The agency best known for its own somewhat questionable surveillance work advised how mobile users can limit others’ tracking their location.
Mobile devices expose location data in more ways than most people know, turning off services such as Find My Phone, Wi-Fi & Bluetooth can help reduce tracking, but are no silver bullet that prevents a 3rd party from tracking users. That is advice shared by US top spy agency, the National Security Agency (NSA).
Location Services
The NSA released the advisory (PDF) this week informing people of the ways mobile phones, by design, give up location information, which go beyond the well-known Location Services feature that people use regularly. They also gave some hints on how users can reduce the ways they are being tracked.
Cyber-criminals have been known to take advantage of the ability of smartphones to pinpoint a person’s location in the form of security threats such as stalkerware, spyware, socially-engineered phishing campaigns etc.
Edward Snowden
The NSA collects information & data for intelligence reasons, using signals, for the US military & the intelligence community, & was notoriously ‘shopped’ by whistle-blower Edward Snowden in 2013, for collecting surveillance on citizens in the US via their telephone & computer usage.
Now the agency appears to be trying to help users protect themselves, & withhold their location data from anyone, from threat players to law enforcement to even govt., who wants to find them using their mobile devices.
Ghidra
This move is in-line with the release of Ghidra, a free, open-source software reverse-engineering tool that was released by the agency in 2019. It also comes as mobile location information is becoming more significant in light of the pandemic.
Authorities aim to use mobile phone location data to help with contact-tracing or finding people who may have come in contact with an infected person so as to try to control the spread of the virus.
NSA Privacy Awareness Campaign
Most people are aware that location services on devices can pinpoint where they are so people can have access to services in the area, as well as share their location with friends via mobile apps such as WhatsApp, among other useful activities.
But there are other activities on a mobile device that share location about which people may be less aware, the NSA commented. One is the act of turning it on, which due to the trust relationship between cellular networks & providers, sends real-time location information for a device every time it connects to a network.
Wrong Hands
“This means a provider can track users across a wide area,” according to the agency. While this can be helpful, such as in the case of 911 calls, it also can put someone at risk if that info falls into the wrong hands, according to the NSA.
