Pie in the sky idea: App that indexes cell towers to a central database. When a new tower goes up, it undergoes a confirmation process that verifies its presence for some given amount of time before adding it to the list of confirmed cell towers. The software would then give you the ability to choose to only engage with/respond to registered towers.
This would only work if a good amount of people adopted it (and various other contingencies were satisfied).
There are legitimate uses for temporary base stations - often at large sports events cellular providers will install portable temporary stations for example.
How would it know that the base station was temporary?
This is somewhere between a rhetorical question and a real one, in that I don't know enough about low-level cell protocols to know if temporary base stations identify themselves in a way that is detectable compared to "permanent" ones, but I would assume they don't?
If there's no way to tell the difference between a temporary and permanent station such a notification would quickly become unbearable as it would pop up each time a new station is seen.
To reply to my own comment, I realized that this could potentially be done more simply by just attempting to place a dummy call to an un-indexed tower when encountered (my understanding is that a Stingray isn't actually capable of handling calls). If >99% of calls failed (basically 100% with room for error), the tower could be confirmed bad and blacklisted.
Also in Australia most / ?all? state police detectives carry General Search warrants, which allow them to search your property and person without applying to a court on 'reasonable suspicion' -whatever that means. I'm not sure if they have to arrest you first, but that doesn't really matter.
A 'General Search warrant' is a thing that shouldn't even exist, let alone that police detectives should be walking around with them. This is wrong on so many levels.
Wow, why even bother with making them carry "General Search" warrants if they can basically do whatever they want anyways? In the U.S., our police can claim to smell marijuana during a traffic stop and use that as a reason to rip your car apart looking for it.
This would only work if a good amount of people adopted it (and various other contingencies were satisfied).