Location firm Near describes itself as “The World’s Largest Dataset of People’s Behavior in the Real-World,” with data representing “1.6B people across 44 countries.” Mobilewalla boasts “40+ Countries, 1.9B+ Devices, 50B Mobile Signals Daily, 5+ Years of Data.” X-Mode’s website claims its data covers “25%+ of the Adult U.S. population monthly.”

Fast food restaurants and other businesses have been known to buy location data for advertising purposes down to a person’s steps. For example, in 2018, Burger King ran a promotion in which, if a customer’s phone was within 600 feet of a McDonalds, the Burger King app would let the user buy a Whopper for one cent.

Outlogic (formerly known as X-Mode) offers a license for a location dataset titled “Cyber Security Location data” on Datarade for $240,000 per year. The listing says “Outlogic’s accurate and granular location data is collected directly from a mobile device’s GPS.”

  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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    10 months ago

    Yes, 3 towers just need to know how strong your signal is, the intersection of 3 circle is where you are.

    But for a long time, antenna towers have multiple antenna, so each tower know your azimuth and distance on its own.

    There is no escape. This is why ham radio was kneecapped too.

      • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        By forbidding encryption so that hans can’t carry civil internet. And then by not using bandwidth, ham get confined to smaller and smaller sections of the spectrum.