922
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
922 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
77589 readers
3237 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Or - OR, right, everyone can turn off location and WiFi on their phones.
It's true the cell ping is always going, but that's a different thing and definitely not what this tool is using to track people. Odds are good it's using facebook or some other cancer to perform this evil.
I don't think cellular location would be excluded from such tracking tbh. I would rather not take my phone with me at all when visiting such a potentially sensitive place, or at the very least use a Faraday cage.
That would be a better approach, of course.
The problem is turning off wifi doesn't actually turn off the wifi, it just stops a subset of packets being broadcast and won't trasmit any data you want it to send. Among other things this is how 'find my device' works with the wifi and bluetooth "off". They're actually on.
You can turn this wifi and bt scanning/'location accuracy improvements' off though, at least on android. It's tucked away in the settings but once it's done, it's done.
That won't work. But if you install the ROM without gapps or closed source software, you don't have to worry about these issues.
Having just done that for the first time I feel confident in saying anyone who's still using facebook or Xitter or tiktok or whatever - is not going to do that. I wish they would but that's an order of magnitude more technical than where they are.
Counterpoint - the only reason I didn't degoogle earlier was because my phone simply didn't support Lineage or Divest. Chances are that whatever budget Chinaphone you have would be in the same situation. Now I bought a Pixel specifically with the intent of installing a privacy-preserving OS, but for a while most I could do was ADB-disabling Google services.
Unlike installing Linux, chances are high that a degoogled OS wouldn't work on the hardware you already have.
Oh it took me a solid month of trial and error, scrolling through xda and other forums reading every how-to and watching plenty of vids and I finally got it to work. But it was not even fun. Yes starting with a Pixel is better, but f* teh googlez.