A technology has been developed to allow people to track the location of smartphones by checking the amount of battery consumption using a GPS navigation system or wireless Internet service.
According to U.S. magazine WIRED on Feb. 19, a joint research team from Stanford University and the Institute for National Security Studies based in Israel has successfully developed a location tracking technology called Power Spy.
The new technology enables people to install a related app without being authorized in order to access information about the location of a certain user, unlike existing location-tracking techniques using a GPS navigation system or wireless Internet service. Suitable for the name, the technique allows people to secretly download a spy app by disguising it as an innocent-looking app.
The research team came up with the idea that as the distance between cell phones and base stations is longer, phones generally consume more power to operate. In addition, battery life is shorter when there is a building or a mountain nearby. Power Spy can track the location of phones by combining changing power consumption patterns with geographical characteristics.
The results of their study were marvelous. After conducting tests in the San Francisco Bay Area and Haifa using an LG Nexus 4, they found that Power Spy was able to locate an experimenter with a 90 percent accuracy.
The research team argues that it is possible to filter out and analyze the power consumption needed to make a call or run an app by classifying it as an unnecessary signal. In other words, the new technology is capable of distinguishing between the amount of long-term power consumption needed to operate a smartphone and short-term power consumption necessary for a user to be engaged in a specific activity.
However, there is a certain limit to the technology. It is only possible to conduct experiments in previously-studied areas. Moreover, street-level data must be collected using existing smartphones. It is also necessary to analyze the characteristics of other smartphones, since only the Nexus 4 was used in the experiment.
The research team is working on a study to detect the location of a phone without pre-existing information about the area.