SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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/
(Score: 4, Interesting) by frojack on Friday February 09 2018, @08:48PM (1 child)
Recent? No.
Its been available for as long as cell phones had wifi. Skyhook [skyhookwireless.com] is an actual thing and has been around much longer than smart phones.
And the resolution is far far more granular than 50 meters, because signal strength from a dozen APs can be compared on the phone or ex-filtrated and you can usually arrive at a two meter circle. The phone itself know what room you are in, especially if your phone can see more than one AP. And if the phone can see, so can Apple and Google, and any rogue app.
This story rides on the back of the fitness app revealing concentrations of soldiers revelation of a few days ago. Stop sending this stuff to the cloud people!
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by EETech1 on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:36AM
That's one of the great hypocrisies of locate my phone, if you leave location off, you can't locate your missing phone, even though they know exactly where it is!
Just like telling Google don't track my location and search history, all it does is make maps less convenient to use... If I open maps, look something up STAR it, and then close the maps app, only to open it again 30 minutes later to find the same location, it intentionally avoids giving me the same location again, only because I told them to not track my location and search history.
I always keep track of how many characters I have to type before Google knows what I want, and I know for a fact that it takes more the second time I search for something. Because of a setting that says please don't monitor this about me...
But they still do!
I'm being punished for taking advantage of a false sense of privacy!