#geolocation

Another Way Police Are Locating People from Their Smartphones

Penlink’s Webloc is an application that locates people using information from the weather, gaming, email, and religious apps on their phone. It’s sold to the police. The tool collects vast quantities of location data from smartphones via commonly used weather, gaming, email and religious apps. It can build a detailed picture of where a smartphone has been over the past 12 months, and update the data hourly, showing the movements of people on a near real-time basis. Law enforcement officers can use Webloc to zero in on a map and look at all phones that were present at a specific place and time,

Schneier on Security · EN

Geolocation determined with background airplane noise

Apparently inaudible background noise from airplanes in a blurry video clip is enough… Tags: airplane , Colsto , geolocation , OSINT

FlowingData · EN

Here Comes That Sound Again

Youtuber Colsto posts their experiments with open source intelligence methods. In their latest video , they show how a combination of ADS-B , digital elevation models , and audio spectrograms can turn barely-audible airplane propeller noises into spatial location precise to 100 meters anywhere inside the United States and resistant to protection by filtering or muting. It's the same pre-GPS method memorably explained by James Burke in a 1978 episode of Connections , but without the expensive satellites.

Metafilter · EN