Hacker News Reader

Comment by PJDK | Hacker News Reader

This is really selling a quite interesting intellectual effort on meaningless paranoia. Who would have any interest in tracking people in this manner?

Any government based group can grab the data much more conveniently via the phone towers. Anyone else? Well you've got to trick someone into downloading this thing, so it's probably not that good for targeting a specific individual.

If you can think up some nefarious scheme which involves grabbing lots of peoples locations, just get permissions to use GPS or cell location, way more apps have that privilege. I'm not sure what you do with it afterwards though.

New research reveals people can be tracked just by watching where they go...

View on HN

Don't mobile devices store their battery usage over time (and also the per-app breakdown of energy usage)? I don't know what precision the stored data is in, but if it's precise enough, you could reconstruct past movements using it. E.g. when you arrive into a country, the border control could "track" your steps back for a day or so.

Meaningless paranoia? If you already have a popular app recording this data would be fairly simple.

And if this approach is practical then you've got personalized location data easily linked to identity. That's worth a lot of money to data brokers and their customers. Adding location information and especially long term movement patterns bumps up the price you can charge for a user profile. Selling everything you can get your hands on about your users to data brokers is a way to monetize a user base.

Obviously getting location permissions is way easier, but it's good to know that apps without those permissions could still be selling your location data.

Not sure if the "Who would have any interest in tracking people in this manner?" is really relevant. Based on the collect all, hoover all metadata etc that seems to be going on, _anything_ remotely possibly useful seems to be interesting.

And the big thing is that this data can of course (and will be) correlated with things like cell tower location, wifi hotspots all kinds of other metadata.

Makes one wonder what STASI could come up with had it still been operating...

Given how bad NSA and GCHQ (the presumed good guys) have been, STASI would have truly been frightening. They probably would have terrified Sauron.

Technology is not exactly known to be stagnant. What is not practical now could be in just a few years.

For high value targets, all bets are off anyway. Some nation states have virtually unlimited resources they can call on.

Yeah, exactly. This is just a back door to phone tower triangulation, something every nation state has access to and uses regularly and publicly as part of normal criminal investigations.

But phone tower triangulation is only readily available to nation states on their own soil. For tracking foreigners tracking signal strength might be a useful alternative.

Confirmation or double checking that the user isn't spoofing GPS?

Though it seems the results would be useless if a Stringray were in the vicinity, and I thought the assumption was that Stingrays were everywhere.

I am sure that advertisers would like the data if unavailable via other means, redundancy is being offered by this technique.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com