4 ms·
Just using GMail could help Google to find your approx. location 7/24. Your phone checking emails all the time, so google knows your ip.
by ecabuk 6y ago
Just using GMail could help Google to find your approx. location 7/24. Your phone checking emails all the time, so google knows your ip.
- sdfhbdf 6y agoIPV4 geolocation is based on maintained databases (e.g. Ma Mind) that usually are city or street accurate. The popular rhetoric that having an IP is having the location is most often wrong unless Your users have static IPs registered to them. The way law enforcement does it is by subpoening the owner of the IP of pointing to the user associated with the IP at specific time but that still is prone to errors because of NATs - many distinct clients behind a single address. All in all fingerprinting is using IPs pretty rarely nowadays.
- tpmx 6y agoThe combination of occasional GPS/Wifi location data and continuous IP data is pretty powerful though.
- inquirerofsorts 6y agoThere's a setting hidden away in android allowing apps to scan local wifi/bluetooth networks even when wifi is turned "off". Enabled by default of course.
- rainingcatndogs 6y agoWhat settings is that?
- est31 6y agoIf other devices in your network send data to Google, the network is uniquely identifiable by Google, no matter what individual devices of guests etc. do.
- kortilla 6y agoCGNAT means sometimes an IP just identifies an entire ISP and nothing more.
- ecabuk 6y agoI bet Google can do better job than the MaxMind but even the city accuracy isn’t that enough? I think it is enough to effect your localized ads.
- inquirerofsorts 6y agoBehind a CGNAT, which most mobiles devices are, makes that point fairly moot. When I look up "my ip" on the phone it's always in a capital city 6 hours away. Your mileage may vary of course.
- octoberfranklin 6y agoThere are only three mobile carriers in the US, which means at most three organizations controlling the CGNATs. I can assure you that they are selling the reverse port-to-user mapping to the highest bidders.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoWhy would they sell to the highest bidder? The make more money from non-exclusive sales.
- inquirerofsorts 6y agoDon't know much about US carriers apart from brief interactions but I thought it was clear they were selling that data to 3rd parties for years and then got Government blessing to do it after being called out? Seems insane to me, it's one of those thing you take for granted elsewhere, yeah of course my mobile ISP knows my location, as does the govt if they ask the ISP in an email, that's fine. (Quite sure most carriers have no qualms just handing it over on request) But just selling that info for cents to any third party seems so utterly egregious and a massive betrayal of consumer trust.
- kortilla 6y ago>I can assure you that they are selling the reverse port-to-user mapping to the highest bidders. Based on what evidence?
- izacus 6y agoPhones actually use push services (Googles FCM and Apples APNS among others) to get notifications. They don't really "check email" like your desktop PC does with a cron job. Having said that, both Apple APNS and Google FCM do send regular heartbeat to their respective servers which make your positional tracking possible by both companies.
- dmortin 6y ago> Your phone checking emails all the time I turned off mail sync, I only trigger it manually, so there is a way to avoid the constant checking.
- disown 6y agoNot just your current location, but where you've been and where you will be going. If you are traveling, moving, changing jobs, etc, you probably had some interaction via emails. If you had access to a significant portion of a country/world's emails, imagine the power you truly have.