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Comment by diebeforei485 | Hacker News Reader

This only applies to places with UWB (mmWave) which is very few places. Prior to 5G, the network was borderline unusable in these crowded places and people used Wi-Fi (which has similar location tracking concerns). For the average user this hasn't changed anything.

For very privacy-conscious users, you can always turn off UWB.

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Privacy vs coverage in crowded places seems like a valid (though uncomfortable) choice.

In crowded places like trains or planes, where it matters most for me personally, you already don't have a location privacy once you've boarded: your seat is known.

Can you? Can you really?

Does it matter? If you do, you'll be using Wifi in those places, which has similar privacy problems, right? And if you disable both, you barely have coverage in those places, which doesn't seem better.

Ordinary mobile network use is not all that location-private. Wifi is worse. Looks like the mmwave 5g is even worse than that. Exact location privacy rarely directly matters to me personally but it doesn't follow that there is no risk of society-scale bad effects, or impact on other people that I ought to be concerned about. What I questioned, though, was whether it will really be practical for anyone to choose how much they engage with this. It's not so hard to turn wifi off when out and on when at home, lots of people do mote because it can be a nuisance than out of privacy concern. Will it really be equally easy to choose which bits of 5g spectrum a phone uses? If you think so, I have a a bridge for sale...

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