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Turning Off Your Location Doesn't Turn Off Tracking
Your phone has a location pin toggle in the quick settings slider. You can also find it in the settings app as a toggle labeled location. Turning it off should mean that your phone’s location isn’t being tracked anymore, but even if you turn it off, you’re still being tracked. Let me show you why and how you can make it harder to track your phone.
What the Location Toggle Actually Does
First, the location toggle only works for the GPS hardware inside the phone. Toggling it off turns the GPS off. GPS tracking is accurate within a few meters, but satellite-based tracking isn’t the only way to precisely track your phone.
You might think the only other way is cellular triangulation, which uses the nearest cell tower to lock in on your location, but it can’t pinpoint where your phone is. It’s far less precise if there’s interference in the way. But even if you disable cellular or take out the SIM card, you can still be tracked.
There are a bunch of other ways for companies and people to track your location just as precisely as GPS pinpointing (and your location history, too).
Apps Can Still Track You Without GPS
As soon as you go online, your IP address is visible to apps and websites. This public IP address is linked to your internet service provider, and some companies maintain huge databases of public IP addresses and ISP registrations, tagged by geolocation. Anyone who can see your public IP address can use those databases to look up the neighborhood (or at the very least the city or town you’re in).
Just like with IP addresses, there are organizations that maintain large databases of Wi-Fi access points linked to GPS pinpoints. Now your phone is constantly scanning for Wi-Fi networks available around you and collecting information about these networks.
By tracing the Wi-Fi signal strength, the app can tell how far away you are from that particular Wi-Fi access point. Then it compares that estimate with the vast location databases available online to predict your location. This tracing is startlingly accurate, down to one or three meters.
Phones do something similar with Bluetooth too, except combining it with those other methods makes the tracing accurate down to the centimeter. There are super sophisticated machine learning algorithms that make those predictions even more accurate and consistent.
Often, you see apps requesting permissions to access your location. If you grant that permission even once, the app caches that location data in its storage. After that, even if you disable GPS or revoke that permission, it has your last known location. Then it can combine that timed GPS history with the IP address or Wi-Fi tracing to predict your current location. For example, apps can tell when you’re driving because phones have sensors that can track the phone’s direction and speed.
Browsers Regularly Try To Locate You
Your public IP address isn’t the only way for websites to trace your location. Websites can ask your phone’s browser for GPS access with a simple API request. They can also access Wi-Fi and cellular positioning to get your precise location. You have to manually grant this access though.
Just like apps, websites can use cookies to keep a log of your last known locations, even after you revoke their access to geolocation services. Websites have a leg up on apps in a way because cookies and scripts let them track you across websites. They can collect and share your location data with each other just because your browser is allowing cookies and JavaScript.
Google Knows Everywhere You've Been and it Keeps a Record
Open the Google Maps app on your phone and tap your profile icon. Then go to Settings > Maps Timeline.
Here you’ll see a timeline tracing every single place you have ever been. It’ll show you all the cities, buildings, routes, and vacation trips you have taken and when. The timeline can be filtered by year, date or most visited places. The timeline shows the addresses and routes, and whether you walked, drove, or biked there.
What You Can Do to Minimize Location Tracking
Short of manually removing the networking chip or keeping the phone in a Faraday bag, there’s no absolute way to disable location tracking on a phone. You can minimize it, though. Start by going to Settings > App Permissions and revoking location permissions for apps. Most apps never need your location access anyway, so it’s a good idea to keep their location services off.
You can keep the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off when you don’t need them. For older Google accounts, the location history feature I talked about is enabled by default, and if it is for you, you can simply disable it on the timeline page.
Modern phones are constantly being tracked on a scale that’s hard to imagine or appreciate fully. Turning the GPS chip off, which is all that the location toggle does, is far from the only tracking point. Apps can use Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to track you just as precisely, if not more.
