HACKER Q&A
📣 julienreszka

Does airplane mode prevent communications towers from pinging you?


How come Ukrainians are still able to pick signals from Russian soldiers in Ukraine?[1] Are they not putting their phones in airplane mode?

[1]: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2315553-russia-and-ukraine-are-both-weaponising-mobile-phones-to-track-troops/

  👤 eesmith Accepted Answer ✓
Given the intercepted mobile calls from Russian soldiers, they are clearly not all putting their phones in airplane mode.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=intercepted+calls+from+Russian+sol...

See also https://taskandpurpose.com/news/russia-ukraine-cell-phones-t... , which includes the example of FitBits revealing the location and layouts of US bases.

👤 LinuxBender
Airplane mode does not disable receiving GPS signals so the moment Cell/Wifi is re-enabled location is available. There are apps to spoof GPS coordinates but soldiers should not be bringing personal phones into battle, ever. Certainly not phones manufactured by global economic partners of the enemy.

The correct way for a soldier to call home is to have a military spec radio with military grade encryption specific to that nation and have the command unit create a channel back home. This has been standard procedure in other countries for a very long time and the tech has improved significantly since I served. The communications are monitored by the military but that is probably better than being monitored by the wireless provider that may have been compromised by the enemy. I've monitored calls in both circumstances, military and civilian.