This is cool. Did a lot of 3G sniffing in college and it's pretty bad how much info you can get from it. We all really need to pull Sim cards out of our phones and just walk around with data only hot spots.
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THIS!!
I recommend the GL Mudi. You can install additonal software to switch the IMEI every time you swap the sim.
If only you could put a phone permanently in airplane mode (just wifi + bluetooth enabled) in the developer settings..
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If only you could put a phone permanently in airplane mode (just wifi + bluetooth enabled) in the developer settings..
One such device was the Neo900, which had the baseband as a separate chip that the CPU could turn off at any time. Unfortunately, development stopped sometime in 2018. It seems like they might have shipped some units to customers, but I haven't been able to confirm that for sure.
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Use a Wireguard VPN to your own server at home or somewhere else.
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This does not protect you from all of the telecommunications snopping or eavesdropping.
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Why does it affect phones but not hotspots?
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The problem is that the device has a phone number which is often tied to your identity. It also has more telecommunication services turned on than just data download and upload and those services can be abused and also has various privacy vulnerabilities in them.
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Oh like phone calls, USSD and SMS?
Carrying a hotspot around sounds very impractical.
The ideal seems to be:
  • Nokyc SIM card and/or eSIM (silent.link or airalo) – never give out this number
  • Use a separate nokyc number for services that require an activation SMS (whatsapp, signal, etc), if this is a physical SIM card never load it on the same phone as it would leak the IMEI (loosely associated to your ID via the social graph) and tie it to the data SIM
  • Never use the phone feature
  • Bluetooth always disabled
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Definitely an improvement with the above steps. Probably best to rotate sim cards too even if you're doing all of that.
Hot spots can be about the size of a phone so it's just like carrying in your bag or a 2nd phone in your pocket, then you never have that problem.
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Why not? they could only get encrypted packets.
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Cellular functionalities is different from internet data. See my comment above, but also, as an example: when your phone is about to receive a phone call, it broadcasts publicly to a very long lasting "temporary" ID on the cell towers near your last location. These are public messages that any $50 phone or device can listen to. My research in college was to detect if a victim was home or not given only a phone number and address.
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Ah ok. I was thinking LTE for the data/internet part, not the cellular radio. Also, have a look at "Open Gateway" for more privacy nightmares.
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This link was posted by stacktrust 2 hours ago on HN. It received 63 points and 1 comments.
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