Story 27-28

27. Expose Your Location

Ever since my mobile phone has the location services, it is turned off. For one reason, it is quite power consuming. But more importantly,it exposes user’s privacy. (Check your iPhone: The Location Services setting is under the Privacy menu).

Many apps nowadays take advantage of the location services and make things more accessible. It is also easier for hackers to know about your day-to-day location. For example, a lot of pictures taken by smart phones embed the location information (along with the camera info, the date, etc) in the pictures themselves. So by just downloading a picture from your social media sharing site, retrieving the GPS data from the picture, and then putting the GPS data into the Google map, anyone can probably know where you go or where you live.

What about I turn off the location services, am I safe? Not really. Your Wi-Fi settings will give your it away as well. Mobile Wi-Fi’s will constantly scan for suitable connections. Every time it does a scan for connections,it actually sends out a list of previously connected network ID’s. The network ID’s may look like “Starbucks_visitor”, “City_Library”. You don’t even need much effort guessing where it is.

So let’s turn off the Wi-Fi, safe now? Not really. Your phone is always connected to one or more cellular network base stations, which are responsible of sending and receiving any signal to your mobile device to keep it online. If someone finds out that particular base station, s/he can pretty much estimate your location based on the cover range of the base station.

Then what about I turn my mobile to Airplane Mode? Yes, you are probably safe; but you won’t be able to call any one or receive any call. 

28. Google Location Tracking

Last time we talked about location tracking on your mobile devices while we haven’t had time to answer one question: Who is tracking us?

Nobody could probably give a comprehensive list of the trackers; but on every such list, there must be one obvious name: Google. It is hatching what is probably the most broad-based set of applications for tracking your location. And as usual, they are good at it.

For example, there is an app called My Tracks for Android. It keeps a record of every place you go and how fast you move. It even captures elevation data, which is traditionally a blind spot for mobile devices. The captured data can be uploaded to Google Earth to show the routes you walked, ran or hiked on a detailed map. Thus Google knows your history and routine. (By the way, in case you don’t know, US government can request Google’s user data without even involving a warrant.)

Those location data will be feedback to location-based advertising within its mobile Google Maps app for iOS and Android. They are either used for pure ads that appear on the bottom of the screen or related to Maps search.

Google recently revealed that Android 4.3 (Jelly Bean) will be able to scan for Wi-Fi networks, even when the Wi-Fi feature is turned off.The Wi-Fi scan-only mode, called “Scanning always available”, is designed to conserve battery power because it enables location features without using the battery-hogging GPS chip.

Led by Google, more and more companies are getting aggressive about using your phone to track you. So get prepared.