Evgeny Kashkin, associate professor of the Department of Intelligent Information Security Systems, RTU MIREA, in an interview with the Prime agency, named a way to detect any phone without geolocation.
According to him, the location of a mobile device is determined in various ways. The most common of them is using a GPS signal, which, using satellites, quite accurately determines the location of an object on a plane.
However, even with geolocation turned off, you can determine the conditional location of the smartphone, the expert explained. Such approaches are used by navigation systems, software manufacturers to determine the user's region, as well as companies that use positioning to collect data about the user to provide him with services and goods within his preferences.
Phones with operating systems IOS and Android have the function “Find phone”, with which in case of loss of the gadget, you can establish its geolocation through a registered Google or iCloud account.
In case geolocation is disabled, it is impossible to use the above approach. However, you cannot completely hide your location.
As the expert explained, this is due to the fact that when a SIM card is used in a smartphone, it automatically connects to a nearby tower. “Using the data on the level of the cellular signal between the smartphone and the tower of the cellular operator, it will not be difficult to determine the approximate location of the subscriber,” the expert said, adding that the disadvantage of this approach is the low accuracy of location determination.
In addition, without geolocation, you can determine the conditional location of the smartphone using geotags. Such data is available on various social networks and applications for sharing photos and videos.
Earlier, Huawei's top manager Bruce Lee said that accessories made of metal could harm smartphones. In particular, metal can interfere with cellular reception and GPS reception. The accuracy of geolocation determination may also suffer.
