
A way to track people with cellphones with GPS capabilities turned off - bandbajao
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/13/gps-can-spy-on-you-even-when-you-turn-it-off.html
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debatem1
There is absolutely nothing novel about using a gyroscope for tracking
location; doing so predates the American civil war by 10 years and is 76 years
older than sliced bread. This is clickbait for the security set, and I'm
ashamed cnbc fell for it.

Disclaimer: I've done work both on side channel attacks and Android security
previously.

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nradov
The novel part here appears to be doing shape matching against road maps to
improve accuracy. The accelerometers and gyroscope in consumer devices are so
inaccurate that any track will be mostly useless after a few minutes, but if
they can periodically tie that data back to known map points then accuracy
improves a lot.

I'd like to see navigation apps make use of this approach when then lose GNSS
signals, like in a tunnel.

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xvf22
Interesting, the augmentation reminds me of the Etak Navigator [1] which took
a similar approach to remove accumulated errors.

[1] [https://www.fastcompany.com/3047828/who-needs-gps-the-
forgot...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3047828/who-needs-gps-the-forgotten-
story-of-etaks-amazing-1985-car-navigation-system)

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phobosdeimos
Who cares about GPS? Cell towers track you and you can't shut that off.

As I understand it Americans have no consumer rights so your mobile carrier
will happily sell you out.

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swebs
You can also be tracked via local wi-fi access points. Google has built a
database mapping access points to GPS coordinates. All they need is access to
wi-fi information and they can find your location even if you have GPS and 4G
disabled. There is really little you can do nowadays to protect your privacy.

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lotu
This was actually how the very first iPhone did it’s location tracking when it
didn’t have a GPS chip in it.

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sofaofthedamned
So it's nothing to do with GPS then? So why is this in the title?

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jessaustin
Perhaps the author thinks "GPS" refers to the general problem of tracking
location, rather than a specific system that solves that problem?

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kristofferR
What a dumb title. "How GPS can track you without GPS"

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p0peax
It is absolutely not "How GPS can track you, even when you turn it off". It's
an article for the average consumer and the title should've been "how your
location can be found even without GPS". This is just a clickbait-title.

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hkai
TL;DR: track location using accelorometer

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tzahola
Wow, great invention! They should call it “inertial navigation” or something.

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jnurmine
Doing inertial navigation with the sensors only is not going to work well. In
this invention they seem to augment the sensors with external information and
deduce the most probable location that way - the article is rather scant on
details though.

AFAIK you can be located using cell towers both on the device side and the
cell network side.

You can be located with WIFI too: if you have WIFI enabled and communicate the
access point names to Google/Apple, your location can be discovered. WIFI AP
locations collected beforehand (by something like the Google car or the phone
itself) are matched with their known accurate position and the measured AP
signal strengths.

And Bluetooth beacons can also be used for location. What else... the pictures
you take with the camera and upload to a cloud storage can be used to locate
you.

Having a functioning inertial navigation would be very useful for many
purposes. For example, offline navigation without GPS (=longer battery life).

