Cellphones are constantly collecting location data from global satellites, but there is uncertainty about who is using these data, and for what purposes.
Video cameras on city streets are only the most visible way your movements can be tracked.
AP Photo/Mel Evans
Address data are maintained in silos at different government entities. There is limited coordination and adherence to international standards; good practice is lacking around information management.
Our mobile phone’s location data could be a valuable tool to help track and trace the spread of the coronavirus outbreak. The government has the legal power to do it, given what’s at stake.
What does your phone know about you?
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Every device that you use, every company you do business with, every online account you create – they all collect data about you and analyze it to figure out minute details of your life.
Secure communications are increasingly important.
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Virtual private network companies make lots of promising claims about their services. Most people don’t have the skills to double-check their providers. So this group of researchers did the testing.
If you feel like you’re being watched, it could be your smartphone spying on you.
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Experts describe their research into how smartphones collect and share private personal information with tracking companies and advertisers.
Advertisers may track a customer’s shopping preferences within a shopping centre by using ultrasonic beacons emitted from their mobile phones.
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Inaudible sounds are being used to transmit data from our devices. While not new technology, these ultrasonic beacons may be in breach of laws regarding surveillance devices.
Fitness trackers report their location and map the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert.
Screenshot of Strava Heat Map
Rob Harcourt, Macquarie University; Carlos M. Duarte, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, and Mark Meekan, Australian Institute of Marine Science
You can learn a lot about the movement of people and animals if you tap into the tracking data from many of today’s mobile phones.
Mine communications are complex, slow and unreliable. The solution to keeping miners safe, and rescuing them when disaster strikes, might just be in their hands already.
Myrmecia croslandi ant carrying its prey backwards.
Flickr/Ajay Narendra
Research Assistant Professor, IMDEA Networks Institute, Madrid, Spain; Research Scientist, Networking and Security, International Computer Science Institute based at, University of California, Berkeley