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: 2) by frojack on Friday February 09 2018, @08:59PM (1 child)
Yeah, guess what, fool:
Your upstream never changes, and all it takes ONE MAC address being disappearing and another reappearing to figure this out. You have no control of the mac immediatly up stream of yours, and no control of the finger printing already performed on the computers behind your APs, nor do you have control of every app on every device reporting its MAC to the mother ship.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @09:15PM
Are you sure you know how the data link layer works?