Phone hackers able to track your location without your knowledge

Using inexpensive cell phones along with open source software computer science Ph.D. student Denis Foo Kune at the University of Minnesota, along associate professors Nick Hopper and Yongdae Kim as well as undergraduate student John Koelndorfer, has shown that any third party can track the location of your cell phone without your knowledge.

This happens because cell phone towers need to track subscribers in order to provide an efficient service so as Foo Kune puts it your cell phone network has to at least loosely track your phone within large regions which means like CB radios of the past the tower will broadcast a page to your phone and then wait for your phone to respond.

Due to this need to loosely track your phone the group at the university has been able to demonstrate that accessing the cell phone user’s location information is fairly easy.  “It has a low entry barrier,” Foo Kune said. “Being attainable through open source projects running on commodity software.”