Could someone be tracking you as you drive around your city or town? You may think turning off your smartphone’s location will prevent this, but researchers from Northeastern University in Boston found that isn’t always the case. “Not a lot of people are aware of this problem. Mainly because when we think about location, we associate it with the GPS on the phone,” said Sashank Narain a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern. In a test, Narain and his team were able to track people driving through Boston, Waltham, Massachusetts, and London. Traditional locators, like GPS were turned off — so the researchers used other sensors. “The goal of our project is to make people aware that vulnerabilities such as these exist, and they should be taken care of,” Narain added. Guevara Noubir, a professor at Northeastern University who was involved in the research and also directs Northeastern’s Cybersecurity & Information Assurance Graduate Program, told CNBC that “there’s a whole area, what's called the side channel attacks, where you use side information to infer something that can have an impact on security,” and specifically, privacy.

‘Best spying device’

Using Android phones running Google’s operating system, the researchers did the tracking using sensors in smartphones that were not designed to track location. Those tools included an accelerometer, which tracks how fast a phone is moving, a magnetometer, which works like a digital compass, and a gyroscope, which tracks rotation. These sensors are responsible for things like changing the screen orientation from horizontal to vertical when the phone is moved. “People don't really realize that their mobile phone, with access to all these sensors, is, in some sense, potentially like the best spying device you can imagine…” Noubir said.

Gestures on Android P make Android phones similar to the iPhone X Todd Haselton | CNBC