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 bob_super on Friday February 09 2018, @09:51PM
I'm pretty sure Google used to say it might collect localization data even when localization services are off.
Of course, turning off both WiFi and GPS makes the location a lot less precise, but after a while learning your habits, it's not a stretch to imagine that Google gets pretty good at guessing.