John Z Black

John Z Black May 1, 2026 Privacy & Digital Rights #telecom #SS7 #Citizen-Lab #surveillance #location-tracking

Your phone is sitting right next to you, untouched. But a surveillance vendor with the right access could find your current cell tower in seconds. And they don’t even need to hack your device.

Citizen Lab just outed two vendors, FTS and Social-Net, who’ve been posing as legitimate cell carriers to query the global telecom backbone. They’re exploiting protocols like SS7 and Diameter, which handle how carriers talk to each other. These systems are decades old and have zero authentication; if you can get onto the backbone, the network will answer your location query without a single notification hitting the user’s screen.

Here’s the frustrating bit: there is no app for this. Signal encrypts your messages, but it won’t stop a carrier-level query from finding your location. VPNs don’t help either, because the signaling layer is separate from your data connection.

We’re looking at a structural failure in how the world’s telecommunications work. Until carriers decide to implement real identity checks on their backbone, your most private metadata is basically public record for anyone with a checkbook and the right connections.

Learn more about the ‘Phantom Operator’ method used to track phone locations globally.