Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

discuss: use cell tower information as primary geolocation signal #421

Closed
bassosimone opened this issue Feb 1, 2020 · 4 comments
Closed
Assignees
Labels
priority/high Important issue that needs attention soon

Comments

@bassosimone
Copy link

bassosimone commented Feb 1, 2020

I want to make sure we don't forget about this opportunity. As mentioned by @fortuna in the #ooni slack channel: "the Mobile Country Code and the Mobile Network Code from the SIM card [...] do not require extra permissions [...] On Android, we can use the TelephonyManager API to collect that information. On iOS there's CTCarrier." Ideally we can discuss this in a dev meeting in this sprint?

@bassosimone bassosimone added the priority/high Important issue that needs attention soon label Feb 1, 2020
@fortuna
Copy link

fortuna commented Feb 3, 2020

IP-based geolocation can be far from 100% precision in some locations. If you have a lot of data in locations with lower precision, the misclassified data can contaminate and overwhelm locations with less data. It's important to be as close to 100% as possible.

To address the issue on mobile phones, we propose to collect the Mobile Country Code and Mobile Network Code for both the SIM card provider and the network the user is connected to. This will provide us not only a new, independent source of location information, but also the user's carrier.

Having self-reported country and carrier information is a lot more precise, but it's unclear what the coverage is. Data from the Intra app shows that the connected network may be available even if the user is on Wi-Fi, likely due to the fact that the user may still be connected to the cell network for telephony services.

The connected network location is a great proxy for the user’s physical location, since that represents the local network they are connected to, even if their SIM card is from a different country.

Having the information for both the connected network and sim provider can allow us to uncover roaming cases and how it affects censorship.

On Android, we can use the TelephonyManager API to collect that information. On iOS there's CTCarrier.

@hellais hellais changed the title discuss: use SIM info as primary geolocation signal discuss: use cel tower information as primary geolocation signal Feb 13, 2020
@hellais
Copy link
Member

hellais commented Feb 13, 2020

As next steps:

  • Come up with details of what information we are planning to include in OONI probe test results and what is the scope of it
  • Make a prototype PoC and try it out in our own phones
  • Look into what happens when a phone is in roaming, if the MCC is updated MNC
  • Bring up this topic during one of the OONI community meetings and see how the OONI community feels about this

@bassosimone bassosimone changed the title discuss: use cel tower information as primary geolocation signal discuss: use cell tower information as primary geolocation signal Feb 13, 2020
@bassosimone
Copy link
Author

I am going to create follow-up issues and close this PR.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
priority/high Important issue that needs attention soon
Projects
Archived in project
Development

No branches or pull requests

3 participants