Fauxx is an open-source Android privacy tool that poisons data broker and ad-tech profiles by generating continuous, plausible, off-demographic synthetic activity from your device. The goal is simple: make your real behavioral signal statistically indistinguishable from noise.
Not my project, but though this is really cool and worth sharing.
Do you mean when the card is an active card viable for use? Or stored in the phone somehow? I’m curious what online means and if I am doing it… I don’t have any payments connected to a mobile phone but I do have a SIM card, probably paid for with a now expired card.
basically, a SIM is what connects your phone to your mobile provider’s network. Any time you want to use that infrastructure (the phone turns on, you turn off airplane mode, you turn on your eSIM) your phone makes a request to the network, which requires an authentication via the IMSI number provided by the SIM. When this happens, your location is triangulated and your status as a cell network subscriber is verified. this process also happens periodically, and more frequently if you’re on the move. The technical reason for this is that your phone needs to know which towers to route requests to, and that you are paying for the service.
Theoretically, your phone is capable of being triangulated even without a SIM. However, for this to happen (outside of calling emergency services) as far as I’m aware this requires some sort of device compromise and is therefore out of most people’s scope. If you’re paranoid of tracking, remove your sim (or disable it if it is an eSIM) and if you’re super paranoid, grab a faraday bag to put it in.
let me know if i didnt explain anything well enough.
Your location can be triangulated by reading neighbouring wifi SSID names, because every SSID and MAC identifiers are on a huge database scrapped by rolling slowly along every road and every street. Probably by the same people who took pictures for google maps and etc.
I’m going to be a little pedantic here, I hope you don’t mind.
I wouldn’t say your location can be triangulated by SSID. you’re 100% correct about them being findable online, and that’s why its important to rotate your said every few months to a year. also, don’t be creative with it, just have it be the generic manufacturer string or something similar if you can.
with that database, people can tell where you’ve BEEN, not where you ARE. it doesn’t necessarily compromise your immediate location.
however, yes, it can assist with that. most phones, when not connected to WiFi, broadcast all the SSIDs they have saved in an attempt to connect to one of them. that’s another fingerprint. the caveat is that someone needs to be relatively close to you to be able to snoop those broadcasts, or have a device installed somewhere that’s snooping all traffic. in those cases someone is already following you or you’re (probably) in a fairly public place.
this is also an easy one to foil. when you leave a location where you connect to WiFi, turn your WiFi off so that your phone isn’t constantly broadcasting for it. this saves battery as a nice bonus. grapheneOS enables this by default.
Thanks! Now I think that when you said “card is online” you meant the SIM card, not credit card. I use an alternative OS that, as I understand it, does a little to offset the tracking but it is, indeed, outside of my scope! I mostly have my phone on airplane mode, even away from home, but of course not always. I do know that this OS eliminates the ability for the phone to call home when on airplane mode.