How Cell Phones Reveal Your Location – Computerphile
How Cell Phones Reveal Your Location – Computerphile
Many of us use Location Services & GPS on smartphones but Cell Phone Companies have been able to track us for a long time. Professor Derek McAuley explains.
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What about 3g or 4g? Does UDP or TCP pass location data?
So, we can expect speeding ticket on our cell phone bills in the near future. Good to know.
If I disable the GPS on my phone, It still can give me an approximation of my location. Is this approximate location based of the technology you show in this video ?
Question: If you wanted to create a local network to position your phone/tablet to within a 10 cm and determine its orientation how would you go about it?
first of all, thanks for approving this comment. secondly, great video.
I always thought it was a triangulation thing done with various antennas
I didn’t realize that the cell tower data could be used to estimate traffic congestion. That’s neat.
Good video but it doesn’t address how towers use differing signal strength from various different antennae at different sites to triangulate the signal. We (emergency services) use the azimuth from a tower location when other location services fail to give a line of probability, and if it intersects a major roadway or location of interest we can start there.
Please, put the subtitles!!!!
Ok, the phone needs to know the distance. By why does the tower need to know it?
I am sorry i am lazy as truck. So is it right in the movies, they pop the battery out or change the sim, does this stop them from finding you?
very cool
Professor McAuley should be hailed as a whistle blower for informing us about how the phone suppliers sell our locations to the shop keepers. He’s probably packing for a flight to Moscow right now.
I’ve used a positioning service to locate my phone when I lost it. It was available at my mobile operator’s website. It must have been about 5 years ago.
The accuracy was terrible.
hey, No brown paper. Good replacement though given the channel.
i dont own a smart phone. my phone doesnt have wifi internet or a camera. all it does is text and call. like he said tracking is a given when u have a cell phone. its how they work. my whole life is not in my phone just a few numbers & i normally only call my wife. that info is worthless…. have at it hoss
We should know that they could track us through your phone. There are many free aps and games in which you must agree to allow location services. By loading these freebies, we give permission for them to track us.
What about triangular tracking with 2 or more towers???
There have been many times when Ive woken up after a heavy night and would love my mobile to tell me where I was.
It’s not all. If you’re talking or transferring data, not only your current station knows in which sector and how far you are, it even knows how strong signal your phone has to other nearby stations. The phone measures it and reports it to the station so it can decide when you should switch to another station. That also allows to pinpoint your position rather precisely. When the phone is just switched on, though, it talks to the station very rarely and does not send those measurements. Then the station just knows you’re somewhere within its area and does not even know the distance since you may have moved significantly since last time it talked with your phone.
what about texts, is it transmitted the same way?
One of my EET professors actually does cell phone forensics in court cases… this is pretty powerful (albeit usually circumstantial) evidence when properly presented.
At 4:15 This speed limit is also the main reason cellphones had to be turned off on airplanes. Not because of air safety but because it confuses the GSM network. Also way up in the air it is hard to determine what cell tower below is closest to your phone which further confuses the system.
If the phone companies are monitoring me and knowing that its me… i think this is a hugeee invasion of privacy… good thing i never use my phone and its always at home 🙂
I don’t care at all if I’m being watched. I haven’t done shit so why even bother caring lol
No word about handover/cell roaming ?
But if your phone’s off than they can’t do anything.
"Big brother" was never the danger. The danger is the big bully trying to steal your lunch money. Corporations want to know everything about you so they can nickel and dime every nickel and dime out of your pockets. The 1%ers want to know everything about you so they can own everything.
I recall that at least two of my old mobile phones (cell phones, or however you decide to call them) had shown, on the main screen, just under the network name, or clock, or something, a rough location. And I found it quite interesting. That was back in Slovenia, and I’m not sure how the privacy things are sorted out there, but even here in the UK the phone was at least able to give me the area code (say 01223 when I was in Cambridge) – you as the end user still need a map of area codes to work out your location from that (and the accuracy is much lower than for the other system), but it does seem that it’s possible – at least in principle – to have some of this location info available for the end user.
……Mind you, my shiny new smartphone isn’t as smart as that and can’t figure out its location without GPS or at least WiFi.
GOOD
Very interesting video! I had never really thought about the base stations splitting their reception into time windows for each phone but it makes perfect sense. Very informative! Keep it up!
Ey, what about triangulation?!
So this is how Google locates us without GPS? Also gives us traffic information (where it’s slow or normal) ?
If take the battery off they still can track??
The problem is that phone companies *can’t not* know where you are, becasue it’s instrinsic to the system. This must include 3G and 4G connection as well.
If I’m not mistaken, 3G and 4G cell antennas have a shorter range, because of the frequency being higher. Shorter range means it’s possible to serve more phones at once, but it also means those phones can be geographically located to a finer degree…
Scary. Because I have no way of knowing what my phone company does with my location. And turning it off is impossible. And there’s no opt-out – there couldn’t be.
Nice voice!
This is how the original iPhone figured out your location, before they built in GPS with the iPhone 3G. It was pretty accurate given the limitations of the technology.
I actually had a friend complain about his hands free cutting out while driving. Then I reminded him he was talking on a wireless device, with someone 100 miles away, while driving at 70mph past multiple towers and everyone else possibly doing the same. It was amazing that he could do all this in the first place. 🙂
What about your location in case of NO GPS and airplane mode.
Just go home and turn on the WiFi only. Then start Google Maps. You will wonder that Google know your exactly location. Please, note that you can not find your location based on your IP address using any web page…
Then how Google know where you are ?
I think you can also triangulate the position by using 3 towers and their relative distances to the mobile phone.
So nothing about triangulation, using two or more cell towers to narrow down your location even more?
We live in a Big Brother world. And we enjoy it until it is too late. There is no return. It is just a matter of fact and time before we are judged without law.
The accuracy of location data from cell phone towers is increasingly coming under fire. It turns out that they cannot give a very accurate information. This is becoming an issue in legal cases where that info is used to try and say where someone was a certain time. In one case someone was convicted of murder. On appeal they proved their innocence as a call just minutes prior to the incriminating call, showed them 20 miles away. That is one call showed them in the area of the murder, while a call a few minutes earlier showed them 20 miles away.
Cellphone tower data is completely unreliable for pinpointing persons location even to a large general area.
What about triangulation? If you are close enough to two or more towers, can’t they get a very exact position?
Beautiful explanation of something I was very interested in.. At least the mobile phone communication part (hadn’t considered that many factors on mobile communication at all..). Such an informative video
Wondering why Youtube took so long to suggest it to me lol
Thanks <3
With the ethernet systems the length of cable was limited (eg 200m for 10Base2) and terminated with a set impedence to prevent reflections which is why collision detection was practical. With radio waves its not possible to do this and signal strength will vary depending on local conditions like surrounding hills/buildings and the weather (eg raining). Satellite systems have the same problem. Think there were plans to produce a mobile network based on Satellite network in the 90s. Kind of interesting to speculate how the owners of of the satellite network would do with location data at a global rather than national level.
I am shamed! A guy somewhat my age has a grasp on all of this! Brady this is somewhat damaging for my ego!!
I think this is one of the most nerdy, information packed YouTube channels I’ve ever come across. I love it!!!
This is why I walk around with a tinfoil hat 0_o lol
Would be interesting to see how the Computerphile professors react to Watch_Dogs similar to how the SixtySymbols professors reacted to Portal…