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An LAPD helicopter claimed to have ID'ed protesters from above and threatened to "come to your house"
(www.motherjones.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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Not good enough. Phones can figure out its location using gyroscopes and accelerometer, then if at any point in the future, you remove it from the faraday cage, your entire movement logs are transmitted.
This is plainly false.
The error stack-up from the imprecision of a phone's MEMS sensors would make positioning basically impossible after a couple of dozen feet, let alone after hours of walking around.
There are experimental inertial navigation systems that can do what you describe, but they use ultra sensitive magnetometers to detect tiny changes in the behavior of laser suspended ultra cold gas clouds that are only a few hundred atoms large. That is not inside your phone.
You seem to know a lot about this. I'm just generally fascinated by this method of tracking. Would the sensors ever become accurate enough in the future? Or is there a limit to their accuracy due to physics with a small sensor?
It will always be a matter of "for how long?". Location from integrated acceleration is what we call a stiff problem. Meaning that any error is compounded as you continue to integrate (slight over simplification, but good enough for the point). There will never be a sensor that has zero error, so it's just a question of how much integration you can do before the errors make the results unusable.