Have you turned off your smartphone's GPS so you don't get spied on and prevent someone from tracking your movements? It won't help much. From what emerged from a research by Northeastern University, sensors for quantifying the speed of movement or the direction in which the latest generation devices are pointing are able, even without having access to the actual location, to provide enough information to make the phone traceable.
Researcher Sashank Narain said that "not many people are aware of this problem, especially since when we think about location, the GPS on the phone comes to mind". Tracking can instead also be done through other systems, let's see which ones .
How to track smartphones without GPS
The accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope are responsible for involuntary localization: these are the sensors present in smartphones used by researchers to track several people with Android devices and GPS worn out. These users, who knew about the experiment, drove to Boston, Waltham, Massachusetts and London after installing an app on their phone.
The results indicate that in some cities locating would be easier than in others, for example in Boston, where there are curves and particular turns, the accuracy can be up to 50%, while "in a place like Manhattan , which is similar to a grid, is much more difficult”.
The more information you have, the easier it is to find the smartphone concerned, in fact it is easier to find data such as home, workplace and movements for a person who travels the same road every day. Accuracy in these cases can go as high as 90%, a rate that researchers believe will rise over time.
Guevara Noubir, a professor at Northeastern University who took part in the research, said “we didn't expect such accuracy. These sensors, evolving and increasing in precision, could become one of the main means for the invasion of user privacy".
Although the experiment was conducted on Android, Noubir expects it would also work on iPhone, given the presence of the same sensors with similar permissions.
Localization and privacy
Professor Guevara Noubir also stated that "there is a whole area called side channel attack, which deals with finding subsidiary information to conduct to a security attack,” referring in particular to privacy risks. .
Regarding these results, Google said that Android P, the next OS, will reduce access to sensors such as the accelerometer and gyroscope. However, a spokesman said this research also underlines the difficulty that tracking without GPS entails.
However, this is an additional concern in a period in which the protection of privacy is becoming one of the most discussed topics, with the main competitors in the mobile sector, Apple and Samsung, seeking to improve the protection of personal data and new search engines that focus on confidentiality to wage war on Google.