I’m timid about this and might be late to a party where others already had this idea, so please, no haters.

I can’t get over how facile and stupid the identification of LM was at a McDoballs. This is someone who fell off the entire grid for three months??

Just asking… but couldn’t an organization trying to conceal its reach and inevitability track a fella… and then… force an identification?

I do not have any idea about details… it’s broad strokes. Could it be? How many other privacy lovers heard about these three months completely off the grid somehow and also wondered… how?

Please pardon if this isn’t the appropriate place but the real theme is privacy. What if the watchers are always watching even when a person might believe they have made themself completely digitally invisible?

    • MonkeyBusiness@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      1 day ago

      Even with location off, couldn’t the cell provider track him using his phone connections by triangulating the latency between at least three cell towers? They may not get a location as precise as GPS, but they’d be close enough. I guess there could be an app that creates false latency in order to throw off cell providers, but that seems extreme and possibly illegal. Unless configured, it would also give odd locations to the cell provider which may trigger further investigation. “John Doe was in Long Island 3 minutes ago, and now they’re in Newark. That’s unusual.” To go completely off of the grid, a person would have to not log into anything and also have no cell phone. They’d have to go back in time to the early 90s using maps, notebooks, and public phones.

      • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
        0·
        1 day ago

        I imagine you’d either have no phone, or one of those prepaid with cash ones. You could also probably turn off the cell parts and only use wifi

        • invertedspear@lemm.ee
          0·
          4 hours ago

          Do not depend on WiFi to hide your location.

          Google’s (not sure about other’s) location services keeps track of WiFi access points and the coordinates of devices that connect to them, and with the way Google sucks up all data, probably even just passing in range of. So WiFi can tattle on your location as well.

          A job I had a few years back closed one office in PA and sent their WiFi APs to us in AZ as they were way better than what we had. For about a week this played havoc with everyone in the office’s location when using Google maps. A few of us that played Ingress (precursor game to Pokémon go) could start the game and get an action against the point in PA before our GPS would override the WiFi location.