[AMENDMENT] is the "Spoofing GPS" advise suggesting something illegal?

[dbrockman]

Location

Social Media

Amendments

The checklist item "Consider Spoofing GPS in home vicinity" could be illegal. This is in the Social Media section.

I don't know about any particular laws relating to this but I think it's safe to assume that this would be illegal in most jurisdictions, especially near populated areas.

I would assume that you would at least get in some kind of trouble if you started broadcasting signals that mess with GPS.

I'm not suggesting a particular edit here. I just wanted to bring attention to this because it stood out to me as potentially bad advise.

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[fcmss]

I don't know about any particular laws relating to this but I think it's safe to assume that this would be illegal

How can you assume it is if you don't know laws? Best you can do is look up laws in your country and give feedback, but even then, the laws are changing from country to country. But the tip you're referring to doesn't ask to pinpoint another address of someone you don't know, it's here to tell you that you should spoof it to a near city. Could point to a park, a parking lot, a forest, whatever you want it to be. And you're not broadcasting signals that mess with GPS, you're spoofing your location to apps that requests it. Cheers.

[dbrockman]

Ok, yeah. If it's something that you do locally on your own device then it's obviously ok.

It was the description that made me think that the advice was to spoof GPS for anyone in the vicinity.

It does say

Consider Spoofing GPS in home vicinity Even if you yourself never use social media, there is always going to be others who are not as careful, and could reveal your location.

I'm not sure how to read that as a local config on my device.

How do you interpret that?

A quick google, just out of curiosity, suggests that even just owning a device that can disrupt radio signals like cell phone or gps can get you a fine or jail time where I live. Just googled out of curiosity 🙂