[karma_pharmer]

The cellular carriers very obviously already have a system like this for location tracking.

Their tower dumps contain enough metadata to determine all the people who spend most workdays at office buildings in McLean Virginia. And then, of course, where those people sleep (i.e. charge their phones) at night. It takes positive effort to erase that data, and believe me, it's being erased. The powerful people don't want it to exist.

So yeah, there is already a system for doing this kind of thing. It will be extended. Plebs like you and me don't get to use it.

[WA]

The carrier, for example Vodafone Germany, might have that data. How does that help to enable a feature-flag in US-based Meta's WhatsApp?

[karma_pharmer]

facepalm

[mikrotikker]

The problem is that these towers and metadata are hackable by China and Russia, and now you understand how dangerous it is to run Huawei and ZTE etc in your critical infra.

[Hizonner]

Unless you have positive evidence, I'm gonna guess that the "powerful people" aren't that organized or that on top of things. But, sure, they'd like to be.

[raxxorraxor]

> The powerful people don't want it to exist.

Good on those powerful people then, because this data should not exist.