<story><title>Verizon, AT&amp;T and Sprint to Limit Sales of Cellphone Location Data</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/technology/verizon-att-cellphone-tracking.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paulie_a</author><text>Does anyone know of a way to simply fake location data? I genuinely don&amp;#x27;t care if it is technically illegal. Data collection has jumped the shark at this point</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tommyallen</author><text>Have your calls forwarded to a service you can answer from your computer.  Securely strap your phone to the back of an outdoor cat.  Be sure to set a strong passcode so the cat can&amp;#x27;t use the phone.  To keep the phone charged, invent a charger that can convert the kinetic energy of the cat&amp;#x27;s attempts at walking away from the phone.  Use the money earned from your invention to buy more phones.</text></comment>
<story><title>Verizon, AT&amp;T and Sprint to Limit Sales of Cellphone Location Data</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/technology/verizon-att-cellphone-tracking.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paulie_a</author><text>Does anyone know of a way to simply fake location data? I genuinely don&amp;#x27;t care if it is technically illegal. Data collection has jumped the shark at this point</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mirimir</author><text>I doubt that there&amp;#x27;s any way to fake location based on cell towers. That&amp;#x27;s all done in the baseband radio, which is not readily user accessible. And even if you could mess with it, it&amp;#x27;s probably very illegal. It&amp;#x27;s certainly illegal to spoof mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) because that allows theft of service.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s much easier to disable GPS location capability. But even that&amp;#x27;s not very reliable, because there are multiple software levels, most of which aren&amp;#x27;t user controllable.&lt;p&gt;The best option that I know is turning devices off, and keeping them in Faraday bags, except when in use. So you get to pick which locations get reported. You&amp;#x27;re less reachable, but that&amp;#x27;s a necessary tradeoff. For long-term storage in Faraday bags, it&amp;#x27;s important to remove the battery, because otherwise the device may drain it, trying to ping towers, even though &amp;quot;turned off&amp;quot;.</text></comment>