For years, various IT security agencies have been presenting methods by which smartphones or simple mobile phones can be tracked or intercepted in various ways, even when they are closed. Today we learn new information from researchers Stanford who claim that using information about battery charging they can legalize the owners of smartphone-hate. The location can be done in real-time or offline, with researchers using battery charge information to locate smartphones, having everything based on information taken in the past from various other users.
We show that by simply reading the phone's aggregate power consumption over a period of a few minutes an application can learn information about the user's location. Aggregate phone power consumption data is extremely noisy due to the multitude of components and applications simultaneously consuming power. Nevertheless, we show that by using machine learning techniques, the phone's location can be inferred.
Basically, the researchers claim that using a special calculation algorithm and information on the battery's charge level, they can determine how far it is from certain cell phone towers. An application installed in a smartphone can retrieve information about the battery and calculate the user's location, but of course it also needs prior information about the charge level in relation to the telephone towers involved in the calculation. The idea itself is quite simple, but what is behind it is very complex and the final result would not be as accurate as the GPS information.
Even so, in the absence of a GPS installed in the terminals or access to the mobile phone towers, the method discovered by the researchers can be used to locate even other mobile phones besides smartphones.
