Smartphone users might balk at letting a random app like Candy Crush or Shazam track their every move via GPS. But researchers have found that Android phones reveal information about your location to every app on your device through a different, unlikely data leak: the phone’s power consumption.

 

Researchers at Stanford University and Israel’s defense research group Rafael have created a technique they call PowerSpy, which they say can gather information about an Android phone’s geolocation merely by tracking its power use over time. That data, unlike GPS or Wi-Fi location tracking, is freely available to any installed app without a requirement to ask the user’s permission. That means it could represent a new method of stealthily determining a user’s movements with as much as 90 percent accuracy—though for now the method only really works when trying to differentiate between a certain number of pre-measured routes.

 

This isn’t the first time that Michalevsky and his colleagues have used unexpected phone components to determine a user’s sensitive information. Last year the same researchers’ group, led by renowned cryptographer Dan Boneh, found that they could exploit the gyroscopes in a phone as crude microphones. That “gyrophone” trick was able to to pick up digits spoken aloud into the phone, or even to determine the speaker’s gender. “Whenever you grant anyone access to sensors on a device, you’re going to have unintended consequences,” Stanford professor Boneh told WIRED in August when that research was unveiled.

 

Spies Can Track You Just by Watching Your Phone's Power Use | WIRED

We are entering a very scary world when it comes to technology and (lack of) privacy.

Agreed. It is disturbing to me the public at large seems oblivious to these privacy threats. Everyone is so mesmerized with the technology available at their finger tips they fail to realize the risks inherent in using it.

Will it help if I wrapped my phone in tinfoil?

Will it help if I wrapped my phone in tinfoil?

Mr. Subliminal says "I know where - Mountain Ref - you can get - Mountain Ref - the matching hat".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just having a little fun with ya Ref!

If you have a cell phone, it will never be completely private. That should be easy to figure out using a little common sense.

 

Any and all other "findings" are just to get people riled up.

If this news is public now it makes me think real spies have been using something similar well before this announcement.

Will it help if I wrapped my phone in tinfoil?

 

I chuckled when I read your comment and I am sure that was the intention but 20 years from now several of us will say we never saw it coming.

We are entering a very scary world when it comes to technology and (lack of) privacy.

 

Correction..."We have entered"