Meshtastic is still radio just the same. It is a transmitter and will get triangulated, but that is irrelevant to what I said. What I am talking about is how all radio devices you actually use are easily logged. Cell towers are one way, but the device is easy to log more locally. For instance most big retail stores are logging people in the door and their movements. Heck, it has been a few years since the papers about how people can be tracked based on changes and response times within WiFi coverage using standard consumer hardware. It would not surprise me if this is used by some now. The air tags nonsense, that is the same type of thing. The real reason you do not have removable batteries in mobile devices is so that you cannot turn them off. They are never fully off. That is how stuff like air tags still work. Stuff like Intel’s ME, AMD’s PSP, and ARM’s TrustZone are the systems that are used. It is a whole extra operating system running in the background on your hardware. These have a lower root level access to everything on your hardware. It is trivial to log signals from all mobile devices that pass a given point. It may still require some coordination to correlate cellular and video manually but I highly doubt that. In all likelihood, the current generation of hardware is already collecting this data. Look at all the stories of people getting caught a few days after crimes. That was unheard of 2 decades ago. Now it is practically a given. If you are in public and transmitting radio signals now, you are fucked. We would all need to dress up as Tusken Raiders to have any chance at anonymity now.
j4k3@piefed.world 9 hours ago
Meshtastic is still radio just the same. It is a transmitter and will get triangulated, but that is irrelevant to what I said. What I am talking about is how all radio devices you actually use are easily logged. Cell towers are one way, but the device is easy to log more locally. For instance most big retail stores are logging people in the door and their movements. Heck, it has been a few years since the papers about how people can be tracked based on changes and response times within WiFi coverage using standard consumer hardware. It would not surprise me if this is used by some now. The air tags nonsense, that is the same type of thing. The real reason you do not have removable batteries in mobile devices is so that you cannot turn them off. They are never fully off. That is how stuff like air tags still work. Stuff like Intel’s ME, AMD’s PSP, and ARM’s TrustZone are the systems that are used. It is a whole extra operating system running in the background on your hardware. These have a lower root level access to everything on your hardware. It is trivial to log signals from all mobile devices that pass a given point. It may still require some coordination to correlate cellular and video manually but I highly doubt that. In all likelihood, the current generation of hardware is already collecting this data. Look at all the stories of people getting caught a few days after crimes. That was unheard of 2 decades ago. Now it is practically a given. If you are in public and transmitting radio signals now, you are fucked. We would all need to dress up as Tusken Raiders to have any chance at anonymity now.