This confuses a technology used for the purpose of optimizing the performance of a technology with tracking for the purposes of selling you crap or keeping tabs on your location for unwarranted reasons. Huge difference. The former does not entail the latter.

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ux266478 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Actually it is physically impossible to have any wireless comms at all without giving away a unique identity that can be tracked. Not unless you're going to replace your phone's radio every time you send some data. Every single transmitter has a unique fingerprint that can be identified relatively easily. It's called Specific Emitter Identification. If at any point a fingerprint is associated with your identity, it's trivial for a state actor to know exactly who and where you are every time your phone transmits something. They don't have to know what you're sending. The electromagnetic spectrum is not a private medium.

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Retric 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How things are aren’t the only way things could be.

A receiver could use a new random ID to call “collect” to a secure third party network which agrees to pay for the base stations bandwidth for every connection. The station then responds to the base station yep ID X’s bandwidth will be paid by vert tel.

Obviously, this doesn’t eliminate the possibility of tracking as you’d want the cell to have multiple connections created and abandoned randomly, but it does remove that ID you’re concerned with.

	▲	wizzwizz4 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		GP is referring to manufacturing variance in the radio equipment, not the deliberately-inserted tracking identifiers. See, for example, doi:10.1016/j.dsp.2025.105201 and doi:10.3390/rs17152659 for relatively cheap approaches. The solution to this is just to make it illegal to store and process the results of such analysis applied to radio signals, without consent of the data subject (GDPR jurisdictions have that already), and to enforce that law.

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kelnos an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

You're confusing a technical limitation with a policy decision. Just because the cell tower (as currently designed) needs to know your fairly-precise location at all times, it doesn't mean that location needs to be stored indefinitely or used against you.

We could live in a world where we have strictly-enforced privacy laws. We don't, and that sucks, and if anything, we're moving further away from that state of affairs very day. But we could.

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Lammy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not confusing anything. I'm saying that even if you completely eliminated the latter, your privacy will still be compromised by the former. When “The Government” is the entity wanting to know where you are, it doesn't matter which private company they compel to participate. They will just go for the path of least resistance, and as long as your location data is recorded by something, somewhere, they will get it.

	▲	lurking_swe 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> They will just go for the path of least resistance, and as long as your location data is recorded by something, somewhere, they will get it. There is the real problem. It’s not a tech issue. It’s a people problem. Most governments don’t actually _respect_ and _serve_ their people. They see them as cattle to be monitored and manipulated.