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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
As it turns out, turning off location services (e.g., GPS) on your smartphone doesn't mean an attacker can't use the device to pinpoint your location.
A group of Princeton University researchers has devised of a novel user-location mechanism that exploits non-sensory and sensory data stored on the smartphone (the environment's air pressure, the device's heading, timezone, network status, IP address, etc.) and publicly-available information to estimate the user's location.
The non-sensory and sensory data needed is stored on users' smartphones and can be easily accessed by any app without the user's approval, which means that the data can be captured through a malicious app or harvested from databases of many legitimate fitness monitoring apps.
Source: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2018/02/07/location-tracking-no-gps/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @08:44PM
Oh and most people don't carry around phones that have their cellphone function disabled most of the time. So the telco can know where the phone is. Sometimes very accurately if it's associated to a pico-cell or femto cell.
Some elevators don't drop calls ( https://www.fcc.gov/help/public-safety-tech-topic-23-femtocells [fcc.gov] ). So if you and your phone are in one of those elevators in theory someone could know you're in that elevator and thus know pretty accurately where you are.
I use Tasker and the GSM tower info is good enough for my phone to know whether it's home or at my workplace or other places without needing WiFi or GPS enabled. Tasker's accuracy is lower for cell-tower stuff since it doesn't use signal strength info. But the telco or similar might be able to.