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Your phone knows a lot about you. One particularly sensitive piece of data that mobile phones regularly broadcast is location information. The app begs for access and wants to pinpoint exactly where you’ll be spending your time, whether it’s at home, at work, or at the new coffee shop around the corner. It’s enough to make anyone who values privacy shudder.
The technical core of HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer)
When apps get your location on Android, they use the OS’s tools. The OS can easily allow or deny this. However, cell phone manufacturers do not manufacture all parts of the device. The all-important cellular radio that keeps you connected? Android often has its own firmware that can only really attack you in certain ways.A new superpower is coming Android 15 Now, your phone will block your location from your device’s cellular radio unless it’s a real emergency. Mobile phone location tracking is currently complicated. To get a better fix, your phone may notify the network about its location, or the network may force you to reveal your phone’s location without your knowledge. This last type is usually reserved for emergencies. Thankfully, Android 15 wants to prevent networks from spying on you outside of these dire scenarios.
However, this change does not make your phone invisible. Using just which tower you connect to, carriers can infer where you are located. And this brand new feature is dependent on cellular radio manufacturers adding support for it, which is not a given (especially on older phones). At least Google’s Pixel devices with custom chips should work just fine.
this Android 15 While the update will be welcome, the battle for true location privacy is far from over. It could also help protect you from pesky Stingray devices that pretend to be cell towers and try to steal your phone data. This is a step forward, but here’s hoping carriers and smart app developers find other ways to peek into your whereabouts.
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