Iphone gps tracks even if off6/22/2023 ![]() ![]() “Launching an attack against location privacy can lead to several consequences, including, unwanted advertisement, spams, or scams, uncomfortable feeling of being monitored, unwanted disclosure of personal activities, and even actual physical harm,” he said. Location privacy at riskĪll of this shows how vulnerable mobile device users are when it comes to location privacy, which can lead to some unfortunate or even downright dangerous situations, Mosenia said. Researchers also reported recently that a GPS service by the China-based firm ThinkRace is exposing sensitive data in scores of GPS services–affecting hundreds of thousands of devices–more than two years after the hole was discovered and reported to the firm. Later a group of security researchers went one step further and tricked Strava into also revealing the names of the military personnel using the app. Potentially billions of sensor-rich devices are poised to become connected to the Internet of Things, creating entire new streams of data from individuals and their environment. The recent controversy over the Strava fitness social-networking app, which inadvertently revealed the location of military installations in a “heatmap” of workouts posted by millions of Strava users. The team’s findings come at an critical time for mobile data security. The results of the research show the ability to accurately track user location trajectories in a way that was “comparable to GPS”-and in at least one case, more accurately–using the data sources accessed by PinMe, according to the paper. Users were located in Princeton, N.J., and Baltimore and carried one of the phones on which the team tested PinMe-either a Samsung Galaxy S4 i9500, an iPhone 6 or an iPhone 6S. Researchers collected unique “data chunks” from user phones while they engaged in activities such as driving, traveling on a train, flying on a plane and walking. That data that can be post-processed to infer critical information about the user, he said. One is malicious: running a third-party app in the background to continuously capture data without arousing suspicion, Mosenia told us.The other accesses a trusted application server that allows mobile devices to upload data to the cloud. PinMe uses two approaches to find out the location of smartphone users. The researchers also are members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and published a paper on their research in the IEEE Transactions on Multi-Scale Computing Systems journal. Using this information, the team was able to estimate users’ locations even without the use of GPS, they said. “Our attack was inspired by the observation that today’s smartphones are equipped with several low-power high-precision sensors that enable them to continuously collect several types of environment-related data–acceleration, air pressure, heading, light intensity–without the user’s permission,” he said. ![]() Non-sensory refers to measurements collected by components like the phone’s gyroscope, accelerometer, barometer and magnetometer measurements, and non-sensory information refers to data such as time zone and elevation maps, Mosenia told Security Ledger. Mobile phones can be tracked even when GPS and WiFi have been disabled, researchers have shown. Using an attack they created called PinMe, the team-comprised of Princeton professors Prateek Mittal and Niraj Jha and graduate students Arsalan Mosenia and Xiaoliang Dai-exploited what they refer to as “non-sensory/sensory data” collected without a user’s permission and stored on the smartphone. However, turning off a smartphone’s WiFi and GPS still doesn’t completely protect a mobile device user from getting hacked, according to new research.Ī team at Princeton University has demonstrated the ability to track a mobile device and find users’ locations even when GPS and WiFi settings are disabled, they said. The recent military security breach involving the Strava mobile fitness app proved the persistent vulnerabilities of location-based services on mobile devices. A team of researchers from Princeton has demonstrated that they can track the location of smartphone users even when location services like GPS and WiFi are turned off.
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