January 31, 2026
Find My Drama
Mobile carriers can get your GPS location
Yes, carriers can see your exact location — debate explodes over safety vs privacy
TLDR: Apple now limits how precisely carriers see your location via cell towers, but phones can still share exact GPS through built-in network tricks. Comments split between “old news” shrugs and worries about harming emergency rescues, with jokes and jabs highlighting the privacy vs safety clash.
Internet freakout? Not exactly—commenters mostly rolled their eyes. Apple’s latest iOS 26.3 adds a privacy tweak that limits how much “precise location” gets shared through cell towers, but the bigger bombshell is that carriers can quietly ask your phone for its exact satellite coordinates. Those come from GNSS (basically GPS and its cousins), and phones reply via hidden network protocols like RRLP and LPP. Cue the chorus of “this isn’t new” and “how is this news?” as veterans point out emergency services have used this for years—and yes, law enforcement and governments have too.
Drama flared when one camp warned Apple’s limit could make it harder to find missing people. The rescue-vs-privacy fight got spicy: some argued you don’t need GPS at all because carriers can triangulate you anyway, while others invoked scary history—like U.S. agents and Israeli security using phone location at single-digit-meter precision—to say transparency matters.
The vibe? Equal parts jaded and jittery. Snarky classics like “In other news, the sky is up” landed alongside wary side-eyes about old-school network tricks (think SS7, the carrier backdoor lore). It’s a rare thread where eye-rolls, civil liberties, and search-and-rescue all collide—and nobody agrees who should hold the map.
Key Points
- •Apple’s iOS 26.3 adds a feature that limits precise location data shared with cellular networks via cell towers, available only on devices with Apple’s in-house modem (2025).
- •Cellular networks can estimate location from cell tower connections with accuracy in the tens to hundreds of meters.
- •Standards include control-plane protocols (RRLP for 2G/3G, LPP for 4G/5G, and related RRC mechanisms) that allow carriers to request a device’s GNSS coordinates with meter-level precision.
- •Real-world use includes the U.S. DEA obtaining GPS coordinates via carrier ping in 2006 and Israel’s Shin Bet operating centralized tracking using triangulation and GPS data, including COVID-19 contact tracing.
- •Uncertainties remain about which exact protocols are used by agencies and whether remote exploitation by foreign carriers is possible; SS7 abuse has yielded only coarse location to MSC areas.