At least, that’s what a group of academics just figured out. Here’s the lowdown.
The Study
The cheekily titled study, “Exploring ADINT: Using Ad Targeting for Surveillance on a Budget — or — How Alice Can Buy Ads to Track Bob,” will be presented at the Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society in Dallas later this month, but the data is out now, and already reported on by Wired. The researchers focused on a three-square-mile chunk of the city of Seattle. The results? They found they could track their users to “about 25 feet” whenever that user left an app open in one location for around four minutes, or if they closed and then reopened it while staying in the same location for four minutes. The moral here seems to be that if you’re going somewhere that you want to keep quiet, you should just leave the smartphone at home like a Luddite. Read more about your worst security nightmares here at TechCo
