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Many believe that disabling GPS on their smartphone will prevent system tracking, but researchers at Boston's Northeastern University found that this was not always the case. "Many people do not realize that they can be found without the use of GPS," says Sachnak Narin, a researcher at Northeastern University. "The main reason is that when we think of the site, we connect it to the GPS on Phone".
Narin and his team conducted a test where they followed people driving through the cities of Boston, Waltham, Massachusetts and London. The services of traditional sites on their phones, such as GPS, were stopped and the researchers instead used other sensors. "The goal of our project is to make people aware of the weaknesses of these technologies and they must take care of themselves to protect themselves and their privacy," he said. "There's a whole area called Side Channel Attacks, where side-by-side information is used to infer something," said Guevara Neuber, a professor at Northeastern University who leads the company's computer security and security program. # 39; information. Have an impact on security and more particularly on confidentiality. "
The Best Spy Device
Using smartphones running Google's Android operating system, researchers tracked the use of sensors on these phones that n? were not originally designed to track the site.These instruments included the accelerometer, which tracks the speed of the phone, the magnetometer, which acts as a digital compass, and the gyroscope that tracks the rotation. are originally responsible for other things such as changing the screen from the horizontal to the vertical when moving the phone. "People do not really realize that their mobile phones with access to all these sensors are a bit like the best spy devices you can imagine, even when the GPS is closed by these phones, "he said.
In order to track the people tested, the researchers have downloaded this which seemed to be a flashlight app, but in fact they collected data from the sensors. "You must have an application installed on your phone, but once this step is over, 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 a lot of unique turns and very winding roads, you can get up to 50% accuracy on the user's site." But if there is a place like Manhattan, which often looks like a network, is more difficult. "
Tracking becomes easier with more information. "If you travel 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, which means that when you take repeated routes, the accuracy of your location may to be greater than 90%. "
Although researchers at the Northeast University only used Android phones, Nubar said:" Penetration also applies to iPhones because they have sensor type permissions, etc. "He said. "The Android operating system, the latest operating system released by Google, restricts access to sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes," said a Google spokesman. "Smart phone sensors do not provide Direct location data". Apple declined to comment.
Even with the closing of the GPS to protect the privacy when using smart phones, users should be careful to only download the "Google" and "Apple" applications, and to update the system. # 39; s operating. Errors in the previous version.
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