Finding You: The Network Effect of Telecommunications Vulnerabilities for Location Disclosure

The information collected by, and stored within, mobile networks can represent one of the most current and comprehensive dossiers of our life. Our mobile phones are connected to these networks and reveal our behaviours, demographic details, social communities, shopping habits, sleeping patterns, and where we live and work, as well as provide a view into our travel history. This information, in aggregate, is jeopardized, however, by technical vulnerabilities in mobile communications networks. Such vulnerabilities can be used to expose intimate information to many diverse actors and are tightly linked to how mobile phones roam across mobile operators’ networks when we travel. Specifically, these vulnerabilities are most often tied to the signaling messages that are sent between telecommunications networks which expose the phones to different modes of location disclosure. This report provides a high-level overview of the geolocation-related threats associated with contemporary networks that depend on the protocols used by 3G, 4G, and 5G network operators, followed by evidence of the proliferation of these threats.