Cameras installed in smartphones can be turned on without the user's knowledge. Denis Kuskov, director of the information and analytical agency Telecom daily, spoke about this in an interview with the Prime agency.
According to him, usually access to turn on the camera and microphone is impossible without the user's permission, but there are not isolated cases when “in Instagram or other social networks, the camera or microphone was turned on regardless of the user's desire, for example, when watching a news feed, using a chat.” At the same time, the expert noted, the companies refuse to admit these violations, citing an accident.
To avoid leakage of confidential information, the expert advised to closely monitor the messages that a particular device is turned on, and at the right time, turn off the smartphone completely or place it so that there is no way to see or hear what is happening.
“You have to understand that having a cell phone, you become a person about whom everything is known: transactions, travel, locations,” summed up Kuskov.
On January 26, Evgeny Kashkin, Associate Professor of the Department of Intelligent Information Security Systems at RTU MIREA, named a way to detect any phone without geolocation. According to him, the location of a mobile device is determined in various ways, and it is still impossible to 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.
