Researchers have learned how to locate a smartphone by battery consumption

photo: Klaus Vedfelt / Getty Images

A team of researchers from Stanford University and the Israeli defense group Rafael have come up with another way to track your phone. The method does not need access to GPS, GSM-data and accelerometer. It is enough only to monitor the consumption of electricity by the telephone within a few minutes.

The battery consumption of the phone depends on how far the cell phone tower is from it, and what prevents the signal from passing (buildings, folds, etc.). Consequently, when the subscriber moves, the telephone consumption also changes. If you monitor the state of charge of the battery for quite a long time, you can set the path of movement of the device with 90% probability.

Plus technology in terms of spies is that the application does not need any additional permissions to access information about the battery charge. But there is a serious disadvantage - it is impossible to determine the location of an arbitrary subscriber only from this information. The estimated path must first be traversed and information on the consumption of energy by the smartphone on this path is entered into the database. After analyzing the consumption, you can only say whether the battery consumption pattern is the same as what is in the database.
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Thus, from a practical point of view, the effect of this procedure is small. But it still makes you think about how little privacy remains in the modern world. The authors of the study have been worried about this for a long time. Last year, they already told the world that you can use your phone’s gyro as a coarse microphone. This method allows you to recognize words pronounced near the phone, although not with 100% accuracy.