A community for Lemmy users interested in privacy
Rules:
I’m traveling to Barcelona and when I leave the train and walk on the platform I receive a notification from Cabify (Like Uber/Lyft) referencing the station where I am.
I only gave permissions of location only when using the app, and I did not used it in months.
How is it possible?
Your public IP is the one of the closest cell tower, but thats only enough to narrow it down to a city/neighbourhood. So probably by scanning the nearby wifi networks if it has network permissions.
Is this an iPhone thing? Because Bluetooth and WiFi are tied to location permissions on Android because they can be used to determine your location.
Is it? Because there's also "Nearby devices".
https://developer.android.com/develop/connectivity/wifi/wifi-permissions
That hasn't been the case since android 13.
An app must ask your permission and you must grant it. And it explains exactly why in the permissions description. Because it may be used to determine your location.
I know, I wasn't talking about permissions in general.
Bluetooth and WiFi aren't grouped in with location permissions since android 13, they both fall under nearby devices.
The location by IP is useless in my case, it usually says I’m in Barcelona, when I don’t even live in this region, and now that I’m there it says that Im in another city. 😅
It's not like that for me.
I was in another country recently (not neighbouring mine, there were 5 other countries in between)
And when on mobile data my ip location was the location of my telco, back in my home country.
Highly doubt your address is static across carrier infra across countries.
Your public IP will be where it exits the carriers' private networks, right?. I learned about roaming in GSM networks long ago, and it at least used to be that all the traffic went through your home network if you're roaming abroad. If that's still the case, it would make sense to have a home IP even if abroad.
I don't believe each cell tower will have its own public IP, because if they did, cellular handover and all the clever stuff going on hidden from the users would be even more complex. Also exposing cell towers to the public internet sounds like a disaster.
Nope the infrastructure owners network, not the carrier.
You can doubt all you want, but I'm just telling you exactly how it is. I checked it in multiple ip location check services. They gave me an IP that was geolocated to my telco providers city.
ip, cellular, gps
Could be a Bluetooth beacon. Even if you turned Bluetooth "off" your phone still receives signals. Or the app can access the cell tower information even with location turned off.
Is your phone an Android or iPhone?
iPhone.
I think it might be the location trigger mentioned by artwork.
Wonderful day!
I have no experience in iPhone much, like at all... but is it possible the app monitors Wi-Fi networks?
Also, I've just checked some documentation for the quite, sorry, limited and opinionated iOS environment:
UNLocationNotificationTrigger
A trigger condition that causes the system to deliver a notification when the user’s device enters or exits a geographic region you specify...Create a
UNLocationNotificationTriggerobject when you want to schedule the delivery of a local notification when the device enters or leaves a specific geographic region. The system limits the number of location-based triggers that it schedules at the same time...Because the system actually monitors the regions, you don’t need to request always permissions for your app...
So, it may receive "notifications" while in background (not "when using the app"), too, it seems like.
There should be "App Privacy Report" for apps in settings (source), where location request history should be listed, too.
The ineffably marvelous Spain is a European country, so they should support GDPR, and you may write the organization about your location data stored/processed, to clarify it.
Maybe it is that, the app schedules notifications for the most important train stations and airports.
Your IP address is the easiest and most common way.
The Hated One has a couple of videos on how a phone finds you location - there are 5 or 6 methods.
Youtube https://youtu.be/WkmTxBTe52o
Bitchute https://www.bitchute.com/video/WkmTxBTe52o
I was going to post the link to his older video but it was made 6 years ago.
Thank you, I’ll check the video when it get some spare time
Your welcome. I hope the vid helps.