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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday August 05 2020, @07:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the OpSec-FTW dept.

Beware of find-my-phone, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, NSA tells mobile users:

The National Security Agency is recommending that some government workers and people generally concerned about privacy turn off find-my-phone, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth whenever those services are not needed, as well as limit location data usage by apps.

"Location data can be extremely valuable and must be protected," an advisory published on Tuesday stated. "It can reveal details about the number of users in a location, user and supply movements, daily routines (user and organizational), and can expose otherwise unknown associations between users and locations."

NSA officials acknowledged that geolocation functions are enabled by design and are essential to mobile communications. The officials also admit that the recommended safeguards are impractical for most users. Mapping, location tracking of lost or stolen phones, automatically connecting to Wi-Fi networks, and fitness trackers and apps are just a few of the things that require fine-grained locations to work at all.

But these features come at a cost. Adversaries may be able to tap into location data that app developers, advertising services, and other third parties receive from apps and then store in massive databases. Adversaries may also subscribe to services such as those offered by Securus and LocationSmart, two services that The New York Times and KrebsOnSecurity documented, respectively. Both companies either tracked or sold locations of customers collected by the cell towers of major cellular carriers.


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  • (Score: 2) by EJ on Wednesday August 05 2020, @12:59PM

    by EJ (2452) on Wednesday August 05 2020, @12:59PM (#1031679)

    You could just stop worrying and love the phone.

    Sure, you should minimize your footprint, but if you don't trust Google or your carrier with your location data, then you shouldn't be using Android or that carrier.

    I keep WiFi turned off all the time unless I'm using it, and I have it set to not automatically connect.

    I'm not a top-secret super spy, so my activities are pretty easy to track even without my phone's help. I go to work, and places between work and home. The end. That's my life. Well, technically I rarely even leave the house due to COVID-19, but still.

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