Do people seriously forget that humans design with an explicit purpose? That purpose can change you know...
edit: needs to be stated that the last data privacy law the US passed was regarding video rentals in the 80s.
“Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States”
We Await Silent Tristero's Empire
We don't, and that sucks. But it's not a binary choice between "you can carry your phone everywhere" or "you can avoid having your movements stored in a database indefinitely". There are other options that we as a society could choose, if we could get our acts together.
Sure, the opsec ideal is that you don't have to trust other parties in the first place. But honestly, for the vast majority of people, that sort of thing doesn't matter, and having strong, readily-enforced privacy laws would be more than sufficient to keep people safe and secure.
None of this is to say that we shouldn't try, or that it's futile, but rather that it's a daunting task: the only way to really defeat this is to not only regulate private entities but also the government itself. And the only way to do that is to make such surveillance political suicide. And the only way to do that is to get the people to care about privacy. Here in the UK, the public has more or less come to accept CCTV cameras being everywhere, with the government now introducing AI face-scanning cameras, which has not been met with much public resistance. And so I do have to echo what @everdrive said: "We've done this to ourselves". Whether it's about convenience or apathy or whatever, we've had the means to object to this and we haven't.
A receiver could use a new random ID to call “collect” to a secure third party network which agrees to pay for the base stations bandwidth for every connection. The station then responds to the base station yep ID X’s bandwidth will be paid by vert tel.
Obviously, this doesn’t eliminate the possibility of tracking as you’d want the cell to have multiple connections created and abandoned randomly, but it does remove that ID you’re concerned with.
The solution to this is just to make it illegal to store and process the results of such analysis applied to radio signals, without consent of the data subject (GDPR jurisdictions have that already), and to enforce that law.
We could live in a world where we have strictly-enforced privacy laws. We don't, and that sucks, and if anything, we're moving further away from that state of affairs very day. But we could.
There is the real problem. It’s not a tech issue. It’s a people problem. Most governments don’t actually _respect_ and _serve_ their people. They see them as cattle to be monitored and manipulated.