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by qrohlf 760 days ago
While it's not particularly surprising that the location of a piece of radio hardware that broadcasts a static identifier is trackable, it is pretty interesting how the location awareness and ubiquity of modern smartphones are effectively creating a massive distributed sensing network. The focus on this piece is mostly on how apple (by designing their api in a way that avoids apple computing your exact location on their servers, presumably in an attempt to _preserve_ user privacy) inadvertently gave public access to that sensing network. I'd love to read a piece that also games out what exactly a red team or attacker could do with _privileged_ access. I.e. "if somebody was able to compromise the location services servers, but not iOS, what exactly would they be able to do with that"...
2 comments

> "if somebody was able to compromise the location services servers, but not iOS, what exactly would they be able to do with that"...

Aren't the locations on apple's servers end-to-end encrypted? I'm not sure what you'd be able to do with that.

Not to sound cliche, but the modern cell phone beats anything they could have imagined in Orwell's 1984