1/ Well, to answer this, sign up for the phone company's family plans designed to allow you to track your children. It's hit or miss, sometimes very accurate, sometimes not.https://twitter.com/mattblaze/status/1082881452079902721 …
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2/ Modern phones and towers have multiple abilities to track your location. For one thing, because of speed-of-light delay, the tower must know your distance from the tower to within 100 meters.
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3/ Next, towers know which directional antenna your signal arrives on. This gives them a 120° arc within which to locate you, the closer you are to the tower, the more accurate that is, of course.
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4/ Modern 4G/LTE has additional crap like phased array, multi-user MIMO, and stuff which allows the tower to get even closer. You need a modern phone for that, so they can locate a iPhone Xs better than an iPhone 5.
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5/ In Modern 4G/LTE, they can also ask your phone. Phones scale their power output to reach only the nearest tower, so multiple towers can't triangulate/multilaterate your phone. But your phone can hear towers, so the phone can triangulate/multilaterate itself.
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6/ So, part of the 4G/LTE protocol consists of the tower being able to ask the phone it's location. However, it typically doesn't do this all the time, only in such cases like when you place a 911 emergency call, and they need to know your location.
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7/ According to the E911 regulations, mobile phone companies are supposed to be able to guarantee that most emergency 911 calls can locate you within 50 meters, or less. So it's the government driving this.
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Some mobile providers also sell or bundle federated wifi access from separate networks of thousands of locations. Can locate you to the nearest Starbucks.
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