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How would you design a cell protocol that prevented signal triangulation? Seems essentially impossible.



Hiding the location of a radio itself is likely infeasible (with sector antennas, each tower actually knows a signal strength and a rough vector).

However, what is avoidable are fixed IDs like IMSI and IMEI that allow persistent tracking of the "same device" or "same user" across every tower. The routing functions of IMEI could easily be replaced with a nonce that changed for every registration. The billing functions of IMSI could be replaced with blinded tokens. And the persistent identity of phone numbers could be provided by independent parties like with email, ideally over a (non-wireless) mix network.




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