Why you should be downgrading your connection from 5G to 4G

First of all - let me explain a few things

I assume you are somewhat interested in improving your privacy, so i am writing this article to help you understand some concepts and help you get your privacy game a bit better. Let’s just say this guide is for people that want improved mobile privacy from gov and telecom providers spying. If you want to completly block it then you should either get rid of your phone or put your phone into airplane mode and dump your SIM card into the trash bin. However if you just want to minimize it to as low as possible then read this guide and you will hopefully learn a few things.

Triangulation - What is it? What does it do?

Ok, triangulation is a method that can be used by your telecom provider to locate you. When you go online with your SIM your phone automatically “pings” 3 closest towers (if possible) and that’s what allows the triangulation. They can figure out how far from the towers you are and by that they can calculate your aproximate location. I made a simple graphic to make it a bit more visual.

As you can see your phone can be located like this by the waves emited from the cell towers.

But what it has to do with 4G and 5G

Basically 5G works on a different frequency and requires more towers, as its signal doesn’t travel as far. This means that the cell towers of 5G are much more densly packed especially in the city. Which allows for much more accurate aproximation of your location. To be more specific 4G allows to track you down to a few hundred meters (100m-500m) compared to 5G that allows to track you down to a few meters or even your exact location as 5G towers can be on almost every roof in the city. So as you can see this allows for much better tracking capabilites.

Downgrading

As i explained, the 5G is a big privacy treath, you should really worry about how it affects your brain or give you cancer, beacause there aren’t any good studies that would prove that. However the tracking issue is real, that’s why you should be worried about it, because even if you trust your gov it can always be changed and if we all just accept 5G the will make 4G redundant and will start turning it of and removing the cell towers. And if we wont adapt the 5G so fast then they wouldn’t push back the 4G. What’s worth to mention is that it’s not that big of a downgrade as the speeds of 4G are acceptable especially for mobile communication.

bonus

GrapheneOS (privacy respecting android based open source os) allows easy downgrading, so you should try it.