I See Everything: How Smartphones Track People

We voluntarily trust our smartphones with tons of personal information: from bank account details to health status and tracking of our evening walk around the house. A smartphone is a device with a camera, microphone and GPS module, filled to the brim with data about our lives. What if bad guys want to get their hands on this personal information?

Let's figure out what methods of spying using a mobile phone exist and how to protect yourself from them.

How does a mobile phone track location?

All modern phones have geolocation services to track your location. Whether it’s following a bike route, geotagging an Instagram post, or sharing your location with a friend, we use it consciously, giving apps permission to track us. I’ll tell you about all the potential ways someone could track you if they wanted to know where you went fishing this weekend without your knowledge.

Can they track me through a mobile network?

Any mobile operator can determine the location of a specific subscriber's phone. This is possible through triangulation: the location of the phone is determined by the distance to three (or more) known points - mobile towers. The first tower determines the distance to the subscriber, the second narrows it down to the location between other towers, and the third helps to determine the location more accurately. In practice, operators use this data to more effectively service the subscriber.

However, it is impossible to determine the exact geolocation using mobile towers. This way, you can only find out the approximate area where a person is located. For example, in a city where mobile network coverage is the densest, the spread can be up to 200 meters. But outside the city, where there are much fewer towers, the error will be even greater.

Despite the fact that the phone “communicates” with the towers in both directions, stealing this data is not so easy: at a minimum, you need to have special access to information about subscribers or a special interceptor device.

Such devices – IMSI interceptors – imitate fake cellular network stations and disable the encryption function. With their help, it is possible to detect a person’s phone in the area where these “stations” are hidden, as well as track all traffic. For example, one such station was discovered in Oslo in front of the Russian embassy, ​​and in 2016, IMSI catchers were found all over London.

What if they're tracking me via GPS ?

You can track your location via GPS much more accurately than via mobile towers – the error will be up to 2 meters. However, GPS works best in open areas, where there are few houses and other concrete structures that actually block the signal, i.e. its effectiveness decreases in the city. And the accuracy is also affected by the weather: if the sky is covered with clouds, the signal can be distorted, which is why the location of the smartphone can be read incorrectly.

However, all this only works in one direction: the satellites send signals to the phone, the phone receives them using the built-in GPS module and determines how long these signals have been in transit.

How advise https://numbertracker360.com/ in order for any application to read your geolocation via GPS, you need to grant it access in the phone settings or in the application itself. Therefore, to spy on you, the villain will need a special program installed on your smartphone. If it is not there, then there is no way to get the data! Leave this fantastic method to the scriptwriters from Hollywood.

Can they monitor via Wi-Fi?

Every time your phone is scanning for Wi-Fi, it broadcasts its MAC address and other service data, allowing nearby receivers to recognize your device. However, it’s not very convenient to spy on you over the long term using Wi-Fi: the device is only detectable in the immediate vicinity of the access point.

Sometimes shopping malls specifically “track” devices. This is done for marketing purposes: this way you can find out how many people come to a particular store, how often you visit a particular store, so that later they can show you more relevant advertising. However, in this case, information in the form of a MAC address is simply an impersonal identification of the device, which does not tell anything about you personally. How can someone get specific data? The answer is simple - “Free Wi-Fi”.

Are public Wi-Fi networks safe?

A public Wi-Fi network that is not protected by encryption and a password is dangerous because all the data you enter into applications (passwords, logins, browser search history) is, figuratively speaking, flying in the air. The goal of the villain here is to catch the data halfway between the person sending it and the access point. Bad guys know how to intercept such data with sniffer programs and then use it to steal your online banking and online shopping accounts.

A network protected by WPA2-PSK or WPA2-Enterprise encryption is safer to use. In order to break such protection, an attacker will have to sweat if such a network has a strong enough password. Usually, during an attack, a computer can only try 50-300 passwords per second, which means that hacking will take a very long time.

In any case, when bored in a cafe or shopping center, try to connect only to official Wi-Fi networks that have a password and encryption. However, you should be vigilant here too: scammers can “mimicker” the official network from the cafe, creating a fake connection. So the best thing you can do is ask the employees of the establishment for the exact name of the Wi-Fi network and the key to it.