All modern phones have location services to track location. Whether it's tracking a bike route, geotagging an Instagram post, or sharing a location with a friend, we use it consciously by giving apps permission to be tracked. I will tell you all the potential ways to spy on you, if someone without your knowledge wants to know where you went fishing this weekend.
Any mobile operator can determine where the phone of a particular subscriber is located as advise https://parentalcontrol247.com. This possibility is provided by triangulation: the location of the phone is determined by the distance to three (or more) known points - mobile towers. The first tower determines the distance to the subscriber, the second narrows it down to the location between other towers, and the third helps to more accurately determine the location. In practice, operators use this data to better serve the subscriber.
However, it is impossible to determine the exact geoposition using mobile towers. So you can find out only the approximate area where the person is located. For example, in a city where the coverage of the mobile network is the densest, the spread can be up to 200 meters. But outside the city, where there are much fewer towers, the error will be even stronger.
Despite the fact that the “communication” of the phone with the towers takes place in both directions, it is not so easy to steal this data: at least you need to have special access to information about subscribers or a special interceptor device.
Such devices - IMSI interceptors - imitate fake stations of the cellular network and disable the encryption function. With their help, it is possible to detect a person's phone in the area where these "stations" are hidden, as well as track all traffic.
Tracking the location via GPS can be much more accurate than using mobile towers - the error will be up to 2 meters. True, GPS works best in open areas, where there are few houses and other concrete buildings, which in fact serve as signal blockers, that is, in the city its effectiveness is reduced. The weather also affects the accuracy: if the sky is overcast, the signal may be distorted, due to which the location of the smartphone may be read incorrectly.
However, all this works only in one direction: satellites send signals to the phone, the phone receives them using the built-in GPS module and determines how long these signals were on the way.
In order for any application to read your location via GPS, you must grant it access in your phone settings or in the application itself. Therefore, to spy on you, the villain will need a special program installed on your smartphone. If it is not there, then there is no way to get the data! Leave this fantastic method to Hollywood screenwriters.
Every time your phone has Wi-Fi search turned on, it broadcasts its MAC address and other service data, allowing nearby receivers to recognize your device. However, it is not very convenient to spy on you using Wi-Fi for a long time: the device is detected only in the immediate vicinity of the access point.
Sometimes in shopping centers they specifically “monitor” devices. This is done for marketing purposes: this way you can find out how many people come to a particular store, how often you visit a particular store, in order to show you more relevant ads later. However, in this case, the information in the form of a MAC address is just an anonymous identification of the device and does not reveal anything about you personally. How can someone get specific data? The answer is simple - "Free Wi-Fi".
A public Wi-Fi network that is not protected by encryption and a password is dangerous because all the data that you enter into applications (passwords, logins, browser search history), figuratively speaking, is flying in the air. The goal of the villain here is to catch the data halfway between the person sending it and the access point. Bad guys know how to intercept such data using sniffer programs, and then use it to steal your online banking and online store accounts.
A network protected with WPA2-PSK or WPA2-Enterprise encryption is safer to use. In order to break such protection, an attacker will have to work hard if a strong enough password is set on such a network. Usually, during an attack, a computer can only try 50-300 passwords per second, which means that it will take a very long time to crack.
In any case, when you get bored in a cafe or shopping center, try to connect only to official Wi-Fi networks that have a password and encryption. However, here you should also be vigilant: scammers can “mimic” the official network from the cafe, creating a fake connection. So the best thing you can do is ask the employees of the establishment for the exact name of the Wi-Fi network and the key to it.
