GeorgeSoros Not only greater location precision but new P9 satphone capab will make you now targetable even in the most remote and rural areas, including open seas, hence vessel trackers employ satph tech.
There's a fair amount to unpack.
It is absolutely true that a satellite data network can be very useful when a device wishes to voluntarily share its position, as derived by GPS, with remote parties. So a ship at sea may very well use an Inmarsat or Iridium device to voluntarily report its position. Or an Australian rocket might do the same (source). That's not the same thing as the satellites determining the position of the tracked object.
Historically, satellites were used to determine the positions of vessels in distress (likewise aircraft), but not with great precision. That approach has been replaced by emergency locator beacons that use GPS to determine location and satellite data networks to relay the GPS-determined position (source).
None of the above is directly relevant to current efforts to add satellite service to regular cellular phones. As mentioned earlier (de0u), those efforts center on basically picking up a regular terrestrial LTE base station and putting it in orbit, and then tweaking LTE protocol parameters so that it works. Lofting a terrestrial LTE base station into orbit does not automatically improve its ability to localize handsets beyond the baseline ability of the millions of existing LTE base stations that are already localizing LTE handsets.
So:
- Satellites can be used to localize objects, but not all that well compared to using on-device GPS to localize and using a satellite network to voluntarily relay the position determined by the device.
- Adding "satellite" capabilities to regular cellular phones is about extending LTE service to orbital platforms. It is not the same set of capabilities as Iridium or Inmarsat service.
If you are in position to cite sources supporting the claim that tweaking LTE protocol parameters to enable communicating with in-orbit LTE base stations would somehow pose a privacy threat, perhaps because an orbiting LTE base station would be better at localizing a handset than all of the existing fixed LTE base stations, sharing that information would be great.