Hello everyone !
I was wondering if someday soon would be restricted to use GLONASS, I am curious to know how to remove it from a phone ?
Thanks.
You will not get rid of the technical capability, because it’s in the chipset.
I’m not aware of a setting to deliberately disregard certain satellite systems, but the phone is a pure receiver in this and calculates your location based on the received satellite location and satellite timing. Satellite providers don’t know who or where you are.
1 Like
Hello . The best way to solve this issue is to find the technical drawings of your phone, find the name of the GPS sensor on the diagram and remove it physically, you can contact your local service and ask to remove it (unsolder it). As a rule, GPS and GLONASS are the same chip. I experimented on old phones because the phone structure in them is simpler, in modern phones it is much more complicated. You can also remove the barometer, bluetooth, sensor hub, NFS - all of this poses a threat, which is why in Librem 5 phones it is turned off mechanically.
Usually those are unavailable in legal ways, so “find” here means finding illegal ways to obtain them.
(I know schematics were published for Fairphones 4 and 5, Fairphone 3 schematics were not because of legal issues, which needed to be taken into account so this hurdle could be removed for the later models … and I guess most vendors wouldn’t even bother trying as long as nobody forces them to with some regulation.)
“Use our unique hardware kill switches to physically disconnect WiFi, Bluetooth, cellular signal, microphone & camera.”
(https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/)
It is interesting, I don’t know how to learn to do that but I would love to remove the micro from my Android media player’s remote !
Do you think that a ban on this techno is unrealistic?
Seriously, it’s totally unrealistic.
- It needs new hardware for all phones,
- nobody can and will control which satellites you really use and
- avoiding GLONASS makes no sense at all. Why would you like do this? For what?
And remember that there are not only phones but a lot more devices:
- hundreds of millions of cars,
- millions of sport watches,
- avalanche transceivers,
- sport and fishing boats,
- sport and sailing air planes,
- drones,
- commercial tracking solutions (for instance ambulances, post) and
- many more you never heard of.
As long as GLONASS works well and reliable and doesn’t tell you wrong positions it’s a good and useful thing. You can use it as long as you want. Until now there’s not even a usage warning out or whatever. Sometimes in a gorge between rock faces when you have only two or three satellites from GPS and there are disturbances because of the rocks you can indeed be glad to find one or two additional GLONASS satellites. The only effect you can achieve by avoiding it are less quality positions.
Banning GLONASS for political reasons is like banning the color blue because someone said it’s evil. You know blue is in the rainbow but you decided not to see it anymore. I say it again: this can change when GLONASS gives us technical reasons for avoiding it or when receiving GLONASS gets unreliable (because of destroyed satellites).
BTW: Meanwhile the Chinese have also satellites for geopositioning, not so many but the number is rising.
P.S.: No cats in this post.
1 Like
You put here interesting points.
Concerning chinese satellites maybe at the federal american state they are more focused on them but I am more aware at the european level
Aware of what exactly? I’m still trying to figure out what your actual concern might be.
I’m curious to know if the current conflicts could (in the conditional tense) lead to more extensive restrictions and what protocol could be put in place if this were a credible scenario.
Ok, so your question is … Do authorities have means to block your access to GLONASS if they would see whichever need to do this?
(Which is a big if.)
The signals of such satellite systems can be deliberately jammed in a certain area, but I don’t know whether this can be so fine-tuned that a single system could be singled out, leaving the other systems unaffected.
On the phone I guess this would need a way to configure which satellite systems to use and which not to use for the location calculations. In case such a setting already exists, it would seem it’s not implemented in the UI, else we could already set this as users.
So either such a setting exists and could perhaps be set with exterior means (like e.g. mobile network settings via an SMS by the mobile network provider), or it could be implemented via OS update (which would be very tricky to mandate and inspect by authorities on a large scale).
1 Like