Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

Summary

Mobile carriers can get your GPS location 2026-01-31 In iOS 26.3, Apple introduced a new privacy feature which limits “precise location” data made available to cellular networks via cell towers. The feature is only available to devices with Apple’s in-house modem introduced in 2025. The announcement says Cellular networks can determine your location based on which cell towers your device connects to. This is well-known. I have served on a jury where the prosecution obtained location data from cell towers. Since cell towers are sparse (especially before 5G), the accuracy is in the range of tens to hundreds of metres. But this is not the whole truth, because cellular standards have built-in protocols that make your device silently send GNSS (i.e. GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou) location to the carrier. This would have the same precision as what you see in your Map apps, in single-digit metres. In 2G and 3G this is called Radio Resources LCS Protocol (RRLP) So the network simply asks “tell me your GPS coordinates if you know them” and the phone will respond. In 4G and 5G this is called LTE Positioning Protocol (LPP) RRLP, RRC, and LPP are natively control-plane positioning protocols. This means that they are transported in the inner workings of cellular networks and are practically invisible to end users. It’s worth noting that GNSS location is never meant to leave your device. GNSS coordinates are calculated entirely passively, your device doesn’t need to send a single bit of information. Using GNSS is like finding out where you are by reading a road sign: you don’t have to tell anyone else you read a road sign, anyone can read a road sign, and the people who put up road signs don’t know who read which road sign when. These capabilities are not secrets but somehow they have mostly slid under the radar of the public consciousness. They have been used in the wild for a long time, such as by the DEA in the US in 2006: [T]he DEA agents procured a court order (but not a sea...