How GPS can follow you even when you turn it off!

Can any one follow you while driving in your city or city and determine your location? You might think that turning off the GPS on your smartphone would prevent that, but researchers at Northeastern University in Boston found that it was not always the case.

"Many people do not realize that they can be found without the use of GPS," says Sachnak Narin, a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University. "The main reason is that when we think of the site, we connect it to the GPS.

Narin and his team conducted a test where they followed people driving through Boston, Waltham, Mbadachusetts and London. Traditional location services in their phones, such as GPS, have been shut down – and researchers have used other sensors. "The goal of our project is to educate people about the weaknesses of these technologies and they must take care of themselves to protect themselves and their privacy." There is a whole field called Side Channel Attacks, where information side-by-side are used to infer something, and this can have an impact on security, "says Guevara Nauber, a professor at Northeastern University.Specifically about privacy."

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With the help of smartphones running the Google Android operating system, researchers tracked the use of sensors in these phones and were not designed to track the site. These instruments include the accelerometer, which tracks the speed of the phone, the magnetometer, which acts as a digital compbad, and the gyroscope that follows the rotation. These sensors are responsible for things such as changing the orientation of the screen from horizontal to vertical when moving the phone.

"People do not really realize that their mobile phones with access to all these sensors are to some extent like the best spy devices you can imagine, even with the GPS shutdown of these phones," he said. said.

In order to track the people tested, the researchers downloaded what appeared to be a flash application, but they actually collected data from the sensors. "You have to have an application installed on your phone, but once you've done that, all other operations will be automatic," he said.

Currently, the techniques used by researchers work better in some cities: "In a place like Boston, which has many unique turns and winding roads, you can get up to 50% accuracy from A site estimate, which is used in the first five search results, but if there is a place like Manhattan that often looks like a network, it's more difficult.

Traceability becomes easier with more information. "If you travel in the same way every day, we have a very high probability of guessing where you live, where you work, and what routes you have traveled in. In other words, when you take repeated routes, Accuracy of your location may be greater than 90%. "

The researchers were surprised by the results and expect more accuracy over time. "We did not really expect such accuracy, but given the evolution of sensors on smartphones used in the test, Essential to the violation of the privacy of the user."

Although Northeastern University researchers used Android phones, Nubar said, "Piracy also applies to iPhones because they have similar kinds of permissions to the sensors, and so to after. "The Android P operating system, the latest operating system released by Google, restricts access to sensors such as speed indicators and gyroscopes, and smart phone sensors do not provide directly the data of the user site ". Apple declined to comment.

Even with the closing of the GPS to protect privacy when using smart phones, users must download only Google apps and official Apple stores, because the new version usually fixes errors in the version. Previous