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posted by Fnord666 on Friday February 09 2018, @08:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-can-run-but-you-can't-hide dept.

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/


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @08:44PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @08:44PM (#635704)

    Times sure have changed now we are all near the access point "xfinitywifi" no matter where we are. Ah the good new days of today when ubiquitous xfinitywifi actually works, instead of the bad old days of unconfigured "linksys" that might not even have been plugged into the internet.

  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 09 2018, @08:58PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 09 2018, @08:58PM (#635714) Journal

    Probably numerically fewer people are near the access point "we can hear you having sex".

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.