36
Is GPS private?
(lemmy.ml)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
36 points (95.0% liked)
Privacy
46763 readers
1538 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
It's not as clear-cut as most people here are saying.
In short, GPS itself is just listening to satellites, and nothing is leaked that way, but most modern phones use "Assisted GPS" of some sort. The most common (I believe) AGPS is SUPL, which seems to be used by most phones. This involves sending your approximate location to an Internet server, which returns satellite data based on that approximate location.
To nobody's surprise, in Android this is a Google server. I'm pretty sure most Android distros don't give you any control over when it's used, or which servers it uses. Anecdotally, my phone without Google Play services has a horrible time obtaining a GPS fix, so I suspect without GPlay it's only using raw GPS, but I've not bothered to actually dig into it.
As I understand it, SUPL means even if you're in aeroplane mode, if you have an Internet connection over WiFi you might still be leaking (approximate) location data when using GPS.
I learned about this from this excellent series of blog posts, which is a very thorough comparison of various Android ROMs' privacy. It has a background section (search for "Assisted GPS") in each of the ROM-specific posts which explains it better than I can.
Thanks. One question though: is this assistet GPS the same as RTK services?
My first answer is "WTF is RTK?"; my answer after consulting Wikipedia is "no, they're separate things".
RTK doesn't sound like it broadcasts any data out but I barely understood what I just read. The Wikipedia coverage on this whole topic seems rather poor quality, I don't think it's just because I'm dumb.