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After that, it keeps track of the turns you make. It then accesses information from your barometer and magnetometer and compares it to information from publicly available maps and weather reports. The app knows the time zone you’re in based on the information your phone has provided to it. It takes four algorithms to narrow down the location of somebody on a plane. Those are easy to figure out based on speed and air pressure.Īnd then, the sensors also tell the app your speed, your relation to true north and how far above sea level you are. Faster yet, we’re in train or airplane territory. Going a little bit quicker but turning at 90-degree angles means driving. Moving at a slow pace in one direction indicates walking.
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As Christopher Loren put it, writing on Android Authority: Using what they describe as “presumably non-critical data” from those sensors, the app first determines what the user is doing – walking, driving a car, riding in a train or an airplane. As a result, a malicious application that is installed on the smartphone and runs in the background can continuously capture such data without arousing suspicion. …are accessible by an application installed on the smartphone without requiring user’s approval. According to the researchers, measurements from those sensors: Those include a gyroscope, accelerometer, barometer and magnetometer. And while smartphone operating systems are also designed to protect most personal information, “several types of non-sensory/sensory data, which are stored on the smartphone, are either loosely protected or not protected at all.” Which is more than creepy enough, if not outright dangerous to those for whom privacy can be a life and death matter.Īs they say, both iOS and Android are designed to run with third-party apps, of which there are hundreds of thousands on the market. Mosenia, a post-doctoral research scientist at Princeton’s EDGE and INSPIRE labs, acknowledged to Naked Security that he and his colleagues had no way to verify if commercial apps are doing this kind of data collection and tracking, “since their codes are not publicly available and we cannot modify/examine their codes.”īut through their “proof of concept,” they have demonstrated that it is possible. We describe PinMe, a novel user-location mechanism that exploits non-sensory/sensory data stored on the smartphone, e.g., the environment’s air pressure and device’s timezone, along with publicly-available auxiliary information, e.g., elevation maps, to estimate the user’s location when all location services, e.g., GPS are turned off. The researchers – Arsalan Mosenia, Xiaoliang Dai, Prateek Mittal and Niraj Jha – in a 15-page paper published on the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) website (paywall), describe how their app collects data from sensors in the device that don’t require special permission to access.Īs they put it, in tests using an iPhone 6, iPhone 6S and Galaxy S4 i9500:
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The cellphone records… revealed that over a five-month span in 20, his cellphone connected with cell towers in the vicinity of the robberies.īut adding yet more evidence to the bulging “privacy-is-even-more-dead-than-that” folder are several researchers from the Electrical Engineering Department at Princeton University who created an app they call “PinMe” to show that, with just a couple thousand lines of added code (plenty of games and apps have hundreds of thousands of lines of code), smartphone users can be tracked just as precisely as their GPS, even when it’s turned off. Legal arguments aside, the point here is that, as Vaas noted, whether he had his GPS turned on or not was irrelevant: Recall, as Naked Security’s Lisa Vaas reported just a few weeks ago, that lawyers for Timothy Ivory Carpenter, convicted in 2014 of a string of robberies in the Midwest, are arguing that the convictions should be thrown out because prosecutors relied in part on cell tower data for which law enforcement didn’t obtain a warrant. That’s never been entirely true – since your phone continues connecting with cell towers even with GPS turned off, anyone with access to that data can come reasonably close to locking in on your location. Don’t want anybody tracking you through your smartphone? Just turn off “location services” or whatever your device calls your GPS, and you will vanish from the online radar screen, right?