Confused iPhone
 

I loaded the iOS 11 upgrade, and this morning when I got to work and pulled out my phone, there was a message offering to turn on the new feature that blocks incoming texts while driving! I'm flattered, but I'm not that fast. OTOH, I do go at least as fast as vehicular traffic on some streets in Manhattan!

All for the low low price of leaving your GPS running 24/7 so Apple always knows EXACTLY where you are, where you've been, how long you were there, etc etc etc.

I never enable my location services on my phone unless it's for 2 seconds to get directions or something. I cannot stand the idea of my phone knowing exactly where I've been at all times.

I can live it it knowing what tower I was on and being able to tell where I was within a mile or 2 in any direction, but being able to tell which sidewalk tile I was standing on at any given second never sat well with me.

As long as you have your phone on it is communicating back and forth to towers. This means "the system" always knows where you are (or more correctly, where your phone is) even if you don't enable location services.

Don't worry, they'll find you when they want to.

On another tack: Why not make the no texts when moving a default instead of an opt in?

Not quite.

The cell network system isn't a GPS system. If I'm connected to a specific cell tower the phone company can say that for the curation of time I was connected to that tower I was within about 20 miles of that cell tower in any direction.

Even in an urban setting where the cell signal doesn't stretch as far, you can't pinpoint my exact location based on what tower I'm on. Heck, in an urban area it can be harder because I might be connected to a tower on 3 miles away even if I'm standing next to another available tower if the one I'm standing next to was overloaded with other traffic. Unlike a GPS system where the system can measure the time distortion between different satellites to determine exactly how far you are from 3 or more, a cell tower isn't quite that exact.

So a cell network could tell me that I'm in a general area within 2 to 20 miles.

A GPS signal that the phone decodes internally could tell you which square of the sidewalk pavement you are standing on. It is FAR more exacting.

I set my DND while driving to only come on when it connects to my car via Bluetooth. I guess Bluetooth says what kind of device it is so that it can detect when it's connected to a car instead of your bluetooth headphones. I've really liked the feature so far.

I believe that the motion detection feature has a relatively low threshold, probably in the range of 5-10mph, so as not to affect pedestrians. As a cyclist you probably exceed that threshold, and (so far) phones have no way of knowing how you do so.

Whether you want to block incoming texts while riding is up to you. I don't enable any blocking features since I have no problem ignoring the phone.

Yes, cell tower use doesn't give location. However some years back, (after rescue crews couldn't locate a driver who'd crashed into a ravine and was calling for help), the government mandated GPS location capabilities in cellphones, which are forwarded to the tower as part of the logon protocol. Even if you're not using the phone, the cell company can pinpoint your location and/or know that you're moving. Whether the location is determined via triangulation or GPS isn't relevant except to the phone and carrier. (and those who care or need to know about these things).

Yes, some phones have GPS receivers that can improve accuracy (some better than others). But even if they had no GPS chip, all phones use triangulation of signals between several nearby towers for location. You are pretty much never on a just a single tower (which as you said, would not be not that accurate), but when there are many towers in your area your location can be determined within an accuracy of 150-200 feet. Turning off permission for your apps to use your location does not mean that your location isn't known to the system.

Triangulation from cell towers is not nearly as accurate as triangulation from GPS

The effectiveness can vary WILDLY depending on the number of towers connected to. The big different is that GPS works by having all the satellites broadcasting the EXACT time. The GPS software in your phone measures the difference in the time that 3 or more sats are broadcasting, due to the difference in time is takes the radio signal to reach your from 3 different places in orbit. (You are 200 miles form 1 sat and it takes x time to reach you. But you are 205 miles from another sat so it takes x+ 0.00002688 sec. The software measures that 0.00002688 sec time difference from two synchronized clocks and figures out the only place that you can be where you'd have that exact time differential from those 2 sats. With 2 sats you could be in 2 places with that differential. With 3 says and calculating the difference between 3 pairs of sats you can only be in 1 place)

The extra fun part is that the GPS satellites are so far from the EArth that they are SLIGHTLY less affected by the Earth's gravity. Since they are further from the mass of the Earth than your phone is, time passes slower on the GPS sats than it does on Earth. Not VERY slower...but JUST enough that the GPS satellites have to be programmed to run their clocks just a little bit faster on Earth so that in space further from the mass of the Earth they are running at the right speed relative to your phone which is closer to a the mass of the Earth that causes time to move quicker. (This is Time Dilation and is part of Relativity. It has nothing to do with how accurate cell towers are. I just think it's cool.)

Cell towers aren't sending a hyper accurate time index to measure against to they can't be used to triangulate your position with much accuracy. You don't really triangulate using cell towers. What you can do is figure out where you'd have to be to get a signal from 3 different towers, and terrain / buildings can impact that.

At best in an urban environment it's accurate to a mile or so. Our in the country it's accurate to within 20-30 miles of the single tower you might be on.

No.

The GPS can be disabled on a modern smartphone. (At least Android. I have no idea what Apple prevents you from doing...but it wouldn't surprise me. Apple doesn't think you should be able to make any decisions yourself)

In fact, cell phones present a HUGE problem to 911 emergency responders because they can't always figure out where you are based on your phone number. In the old days you called 911 from your house and the dispatchers were tied in with the phone company and got immediate data on where your house was based on your phone number. So you could call from any phone, house, office, pay phone, etc and the 911 center knew exactly where you were.

Now with cell phones they don't have that. There are huge expensive systems that tie into the cell phone provider networks that tell the 911 call center what cell tower you are on. And that's just to make sure the call gets directed to the correct 911 call center. For example I live within 5 miles of 3 different 911 centers. (2 different countries and 1 city. All have different 911 call centers and dispatchers. So I am often connected to cell towers in 2 different 911 jurisdictions) When I call 911 my call is first routed to a fancy computer system that ties into the big 4 networks and determines which 911 call center my call should route to. And even then it's kind of a guess since I could easily be connected to cell towers in 2 different 911 jurisdictions at the same time.

But that's it. That guess is the best high powered computer systems can do as of today in 2017

If your exact GPS location was available at all times, 911 call centers wouldn't have to worry about any of that. You could call from the middle of a forest while hiding under a rock and they could send a fire truck right to you. But they can't.

You can also be sure that GPS location services are disabled because the phone performance is different with it disabled. GPS is a battery and processor hog. If it's running constantly the phone will get warm and the battery will run down faster. The difference in performance is noticeable with and without GPS being active. Even if you leave location services turned on the GPS isn't constantly running unless an app (including Google services) are accessing your location. (To be fair, Google services never stops polling the location service for your exact position. So it's hard to shut it up. But it can be done.)

Another reason you can be sure that GPS can be fully disabled is that Google gives you options for location services. You can go GPS which is hyper accurate but battery intensive. Or you can get a less accurate location by letting Google scan available wifi signals to figure out where you might be. Since Google knows where every Wifi signal is (as long as it broadcasts it's SSID) if knows that you must be within a few hundred feet of a known location if your phone is picking up that wifi signal. (Creepy, huh?) As of Android 7 they can do that with known Bluetooth signals too.

But Google makes it worse! Google likes to run that wifi and bluetooth scanning capability to determine your location IN THE BACKGROUND! So even if you turn wifi and bluetooth off, Android runs both anyway in a lower power mode (as a receiver only, not a broadcaster) to keep tabs on your location. You have to disabled that in a deeper level of settings that's not easily found or known about. (Settings -> location -> 3 dots sub menu usually in the upper right corner -> scanning -> disable wifi and bt scanning)

But wait...it's EVEN WORSE! If you let Google Maps or anything else that used Google Location Services have access to your location, Android turns those passive wifi and bt scanning options back on! And doesn't disable them when you disable location services from the main menu. You can to go back into the deep settings to manually disable those again.

Anyway...the point is...Android has to do all those alternate less accurate location finding options because the GPS on your phone is NOT always running and CAN be easily disabled.

If you do disable those passive scanning options, the cell towers are the best way to figure out where you are. And those are significantly less accurate.

I won't argue because I don't have a dog in the fight. But my understanding was that phase 2 E911 protocol requiring location data to be made available to 911 services was required for the last 10 years or so.

As I said, I don't have a dog in the fight, so I suggest that anybody who cares does his own research. That's also true about the feature that detects motion to optionally lock out texts while driving or bicycling.

I'm with you. And furthermore I keep my bridge toll "tag" hidden away in the glovebox. And I've turned off the bluetooth in the car now that I've found out it can be tracked too. Yes, I know it's a losing battle but I'm going to fight it.

In NYC you no longer need to carry the EZ-Pass in the car. The city is moving to "cashless tolls" billing you via the license plate. If you have an EZ-Pass, and link your license plate to it, they bill your EZ-Pass at the same rate as if you brought the pass with you.

In the not too far future, the pass, as we know it, will cease to exist. EZ-Pass will just be a billing/payment account.

Same thing here in the Bay Area. But the pass still gets read for reasons other than tolls. For example we have some signs indicating how many minutes to some location. Like "22 minutes to SFO". (Airport). They do that by reading the tags as cars go along and calculating the time. The claim is that this data is just kept anonymously but there is at least one instance I know of where in a divorce case the wife got the data and used it to prove the hubby was going somewhere else besides work. VavaVoom!

Yes, but they can't read a pass that's at home sitting n a drawer. However they can read license plates.

Rant follows: don't read if you don't want to.

As we move deeper into the digital era, we need to take the time to write the rules of engagement.

I, for one, don't object to things like license plate readers, partly because there can be some benefit, but mainly because I know it's pointless to try to stop progress. However, if we agree to let agencies "spy" on us, we should get an agreement that the data will only be used by the intended purpose, and where retention isn't necessary will be destroyed within a set time frame.

Unless we write rules of engagement related to this kind of thing, the 1st amendment will be reduced to a relic of past times.

All in all, we probably need a constitutional amendment defining the bounds of privacy for the digital age, which lays a foundation, and guides Congress in writing ground rules for what's collected, how and by who it's used, and how long it's kept.

However, since most people seem to think it's OK, and those who don't agree don't speak with as loud a voice as those interests who make a business of it, I don't expect anything to change, except for the worse.

Believe that if you want to.

Also, thanks for the technical discussion. I admit to having a few misconceptions that you helped to clear up.

I'd really love it if iOS 11 brought back the years old (and long since removed) feature of offering to turn on airplane mode when I plug in my phone to my car stereo. I don't have BT in my car so I plug it in using the stereo's iPod input and cable going into my iPhone Lightning jack. Back when I had a 3GS it would ask if I wanted to turn on airplane mode, and then automatically turn it off when I unplugged the phone at my destination. I've missed that feature ever since then, because I'd rather not be bothered by texts and calls while driving.