Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/08/microblit.html
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People get all upset about FB or google tracking your location. Who knew for as little as 300 any sociopath could track your phone.
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Curious if using services like Google Voice can mitigate the risk of this. of course I have a carrier number too, and if they have that I’m out of luck, but if all they have is my Google Voice number, does the carrier tracking work?
Seems like they’re using the actual phone hardware talking to towers. I doing think google voice is going to get around that.
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Makes sense…although if they don’t have IMEI or other hardware identifier and all they have is GV number… seems like it might be more difficult for the carrier to associate the hardware with the GV number? Probably not, but just speculating.
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First rule when on the run: Ditch the cell phone, get a burner.
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Truly a classic.
WTAF???
I knew this was possible in the abstract and in the aggregate…but the fact that it is being sold to 3d parties like bounty hunters for continuous real time tracking of individuals, for cheap, is dumbfounding. No warrant, because Private Brother doesn’t need one. 
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Stuff like this is why I rarely take my phone out of airplane mode. My VPN sits between the web and me, and I can access email and Signal via the wifi. I also am saving money since I have a rather old plan that costs much less than an unlimited data plan.
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maybe. i suspect signal is better, especially if you use a VPN and just stick to wifi.
Only useful if somebody knows it. Even I don’t know my own physical cell numbers nowadays. I have multiple numbers that all go through various voip services and find-me-follow-me around the world. Numbers are cheap, so I use different numbers for different circles of friends, business interests etc. I can seamlessly switch between local carriers and voip over wifi, manage the routing on a per-contact basis to defer, block, or prioritize by timezone or time of day. It’s a pretty sweet system and I can manage it all from anywhere in the world. 
For at least twenty years that I know of. Where u been bro? 
I haven’t found a reliably good mobile VPN yet, they all seem to “leak”. But if you’re really paranoid you can do a SOCKS proxy through the VPN and have robust cutomizable firewalling with randomized packet forwarding delays to a remote TOR client. All of that together is almost unusably slow but you can mix and match depending on which Orwellian dictatorship’s firewalls and spyware you’re avoiding while travelling.
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:-/ In my happy place… Lalalalalalala! I can’t hear you! Lalalalalalala! 
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Anyone know if this is also true of the secondary carriers, like Consumer Cellular, etc?
With a few very rare and extremely localized exceptions (I think there’s still one in the Virginia hill country) there are no secondary carriers or independent providers, only resellers of primary carriers. The primary carrier still knows your name, number, IMEI etc.
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Approved of by the Church of Scientology!
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Cough
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