Mobile phones are everywhere, they have become the main means of communication, but now we use these devices not only to make phone calls, but also to access the Internet, send messages and photos.
Unfortunately, mobile phones were never designed to provide the privacy and security of their owners. They fail to protect your communications from third parties and expose you to more and more types of surveillance, such as location tracking.
As a rule, mobile devices give the user much less control than the same laptop or PC: you cannot change the operating system; it is more difficult for you to understand how the attack was carried out using malware; difficult to remove or replace unwanted software that was preinstalled. What's more, your mobile operator can monitor you and how you use your phone. The device manufacturer is also able to claim that your device is out of date and stop providing you with software updates, including new system security updates. If this happens, you will be left unprotected in a world where there is a lot of malware.
We invite you to read our translation of an article by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on how a smartphone can become a surveillance tool and jeopardize the privacy of its owner.
The biggest, but almost invisible, threat to your privacy that mobile phones pose is that they report your location around the clock. There are at least four ways in which a phone's location can be tracked.
In all mobile networks as says parentalcontrol247.com, the operator can figure out where a particular subscriber's phone is when the device is turned on and connected to the network. The ability to do this depends on how the mobile network is built. This technique is commonly referred to as triangulation.
The operator can track the device's location by analyzing the signal strength that different towers receive from a particular subscriber's mobile phone, and then calculate where that phone should be located. The accuracy with which an operator can determine a subscriber's location varies depending on many factors, including the technology used by the operator and the number of cell towers in an area. You can track down the phone of a particular subscriber up to the block, and sometimes even at home .
There is no reliable way to hide from this kind of surveillance while your mobile phone is on and transmitting signals on the operator's network . Although usually only the mobile operator itself can perform this kind of tracking, the government can also force it to transmit location data of a particular user (in real time or after the fact).
In 2010, a German privacy advocate named Malte Spitz used privacy law to force his mobile operator to hand over records related to his location. He decided to publish them as a cautionary tale so that other people understand how mobile operators are able to control their users in this way. The possibility of government access to this kind of data is not something fictional: this approach has long been used by law enforcement agencies in countries such as the United States and Russia.
Another type of tracking related to this is as follows: the government asks the mobile operator for a list of all mobile devices that were "spotted" in a certain area at a certain time. This data can be used to investigate a crime or to find out who was present at a particular protest. For example, the Ukrainian government used this method in 2014 to get a list of all the people whose mobile phones were present at an anti-government rally.
Phone owners also share their location data with each other. This information is less accurate than tracking data that is obtained from multiple towers, but it can still be used to obtain the location of a specific device. This is often abused by commercial services that request such data in order to determine where a certain phone is currently located. Unlike previous tracking methods, this method does not require operators to be forced to transfer their users' data.