12-22-2019, 12:57 PM
I'am not an engineer, but I try to understand why it matters that GPS and Cellular Network Chips should be two separate things on the hardware level. I mean by this that it would be better to have two separate hardware kill switches, on for each of these functionalities. The basics I learned from the discussion until now is that a GPS in theory is a signal receiver and a cellular network modem can both receive and send signals. If these functionalities are inseparable from each other this means that no matter what you do on the Linux software level, as long as the unit receives power from the battery, potentially the modem can have access to incoming GPS signals. I presume (but I am by no means sure about this) that nor the hardware of the GPS or modem chips are entirely open source and that the firmware running them is neither completely open source (meaning they could run proprietary blobs). If this is the case the hardware combination GPS/modem seems unwise in terms of privacy. Whenever you use your smartphone properly in an urban environment, you will use mobile data to let your apps update news, feeds, message or whatever. This means that potentially, the software in these apps will always have access to your geo-position, even if you don't want this, because the GPS will be working whenever the modem handling your mobile data will be working. The recent articles in the NY times (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019...phone.html ) are only talking about the fact that apps track you and send data to the highest bidder in our perpetually ongoing Brave New World reality show. What they don't talk about is how this kind of tracking is enabled by this kind of hardware combinations in current smartphones. If we really want a different breed of phone running linux, I feel this should be a concern to all of us.
