Hi! I found this smartphone (benco V80s) that has no GPS at all but it doesnt work in USA. Is there a smartphone that has no GPS at all (not something that can be turn off on settings) that I can use in USA? Any help would be appreciated!
Well GPS is receive only so the privacy issues aren’t so bad. Also GPS isn’t the only way to get location either. So personally I wouldn’t worry about it too much, especially if you have to go out of your way to get some obscure phone.
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Your phone can also be located by cellular, wifi, bluetooth, and the microphone. Do you have a plan for all of those?
GPS is an incoming signal. The danger is the other software on your phone transmitting your current or past location.
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buy any, just take out the gps chip?
Not recommended you’re likely to damage the phone.
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Maybe you can do it but the rest of us cant solder/desolder to save our lives.
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Even if one can do it, it’s a dumb idea.
no, it is often all on the same chip as wifi and cellular.
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If GPS is incoming only, how does it work then. Is there any quality video like veritasium to explain it ?
The satellites just broadcast the current time and their position in space, and based on the timestamps your phone receives it can calculate its current distance from each satellite and triangulate your location.
The GPS receiver subtracts the current time from the time the signal was sent. The difference is how long ago the signal was sent. The time difference multiplied by the speed of light is the distance to the satellite. [wikipedia]
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The secret sauce of GPS satellites is the extremely accurate timing information (<30 nano seconds accuracy). They have multiple atomic clocks built in to achieve that.
If you know where exactly a few of the satellites are at a very specific point in time you can triangulate your location.
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Do you mean GPS tracking ? if yes, realtime GPS tracking need an uplink.
For example, cellphone network.
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so what pieces I can practically take out?
microphone, prob.
camera, prob.
what else?
As explained by several earlier posts, GPS is receive only. It does not and cannot track you.
What can track you are cellphone towers, the sites your phone connects to, your WiFi and your Bluetooth.
Wanting to remove the GPS from a smartphone while leaving all the other smartphone features running would be like wanting to remove the AM radio from a recent model car that has telematics. Basically pointless. The AM radio in the case of the car or GPS in the case of a smartphone does not reach out and tell the world where you are. It is the telematics for a car or all the other features that make a smartphone smart in a phone that do the tracking.
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I’d just get the NoPhone, least you get unlimited firmware updates and don’t have to deal with crappy SoCs that aren’t maintained long term.
For a serious answer though, pixel with grapheneos is trustworthy enough, you can just turn off GPS permission/location services.
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not in Starlink’s case.
One job I had many, many years ago was for a company making satellite Internet terminals and we used a GPS receiver in our rack to get the precise location so that we had a starting point to get our station transmitter synchronized correctly to start our satellite acquisition. We used a combination of time division and frequency division multiplexing and if our station timing was off then our station could interfere with the signals from other stations. Once we had acquired proper transmit timing we no longer needed the GPS but it made all the difference in the initial acquisition stage.
I don’t have any information about the satellite link(s) that Starlink uses but from what I read in the popular press precise timing seems to be required. For a station powering up and coming on line a precise station location is needed for precise timing so a GPS receiver is really useful.
So it does not surprise me that the Starlink has a GPS receiver in it. And it would not surprise me if the Starlink terminal, once it acquires signal lock would report its location back to the mothership. One possible legal requirement would be licensing. For example if Starlink does not have legal permission to operate in a country they would have to block access for terminals located in that country. Of course in the modern age of vacuuming up everything possible about everyone it would not surprise me if Starlink is using that location information for other purposes too.
The main point is that the device containing a GPS receiver, be it a smartphone or a Starlink terminal, may then turn around and broadcast the GPS location back to someplace else does not mean that the GPS itself is reporting back. Again, the GPS receiver is just that, a receiver.
For a smartphone, if you are in an area with a reasonable number of cell towers or WiFi LANs, the phone itself can get a location that rivals a GPS location. One of my post retirement open source contributions was contributing to a cell tower and/or wifi based location “back end” for MicroG so I know how that can be done. If the operating system or apps on the phone end up sending that location information on to others, it does not mean the location provider in the phone itself did it.
The cellular service provider has information about where your phone is whenever it is on and not in airplane mode based on what antennas on what towers “see” your phone and the timing of the signals from your phone. In areas with a sufficient number of towers that location rivals GPS location. And they can do that for a dumb phone as well as a smartphone as it does not rely on anything in the cellphone’s operating system or set of apps.
So basically, if you don’t want to be tracked by your cellphone the best option is to not have a cellphone. Disabling or removing the GPS hardware but leaving the rest of the smartphone capability intact does nothing for you. To hide your location from the OS and/or apps you will need to disable or remove the WiFi and Bluetooth a long with disabling cell access (Airplane mode). Basically, you will have a handheld computer with a touch screen that can’t make calls, doesn’t know where it is, and can’t access the Internet. No maps, no navigation, no messaging, no calls, etc. I guess you could play solitaire games on it or play music stored on it but not much else.
My compromise is to limit the data from the phone using a full time VPN with ad and tracker blocking. That is sufficient for my “threat model” of reducing my exposure to “surveillance capitalism”. If your threat model is more demanding, my advice would be to really consider not having a cell phone or moving quickly from one burner phone to another.
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Doesn’t support TempleOS, wouldn’t recommend it.