I have several mobile phones, running on different OSs.
One of my older phones is a Galaxy Note. It runs Android. Recently I dug it out from my draw and started to see what changes have come through since the OS was updated after the Note 2 was released… There are some nice changes, but its still not an OS i would use on a daily basis.
I had a wonder round the Play store. Androids app market place. On piece of software that is available via Android is Avast! Its a clever piece of software allowing you to protect your phone.
One feature it provides is the ability to track your mobile (cell) phone and protect it should you have it stolen.
I have been running this software for well over a month but today i learnt something i never knew…
I knew that it was possible to triangulate your position, within a error margin which was fairly low, using the masts the mobile operators use.
I knew it was possible to triangulate your position using GPS. That’s the point of GPS!
What I didn’t know was you can find out your position using WiFi…
Today I learnt that Apple, Microsoft, Google, all send your GPS location to their servers when you hook up to a WiFi connection.
Its one of the things you agree to in your acceptance of their terms and conditions regarding positioning…
This allows them to store GPS location data tagged with WiFi credentials.
They then provide the service so a phone / device can find out which WiFi is near, send the WiFi details to their server, look up the estimated location of that WiFi location by using harvested GPS data points sent from devices, and then calculate the device location (within 150 meters).
Truly scary…