The risk of insecure-by-design telco standards, radio networks and untrustworthy phones is that zero-day and unfixable vulnerabilities could be abused for targeted and mass surveillance by networks of criminal, corrupt or non-state actors.
If Clearview AI can scrape billions of human images from public social networks, for commercial facial recognition services, imagine the per-geo economic value of passive radio signal collection and retroactive footprint analysis by AI.
There's no point in designing telco standards for cases where the telco is a malicious party.
My comment was about non-gov, non-telco malicious actors harvesting metadata via passive sniffing.
> If your cell provider is going to help stingrays connect to your phone...