Many people realize that smartphones track their locations. But what if you actively turn off location services, haven’t used any apps, and haven’t even inserted a carrier SIM card?
“In January of this year, we began looking into using Cell ID codes as an additional signal to further improve the speed and performance of message delivery,” the Google spokesperson said in an email. “However, we never incorporated Cell ID into our network sync system, so that data was immediately discarded, and we updated it to no longer request Cell ID.”
If they were “never used or stored”, why did they start collecting them in the first place? This is like a kid caught with their hand in the cookie jar saying they weren’t going to eat any cookies. Sure.
The attack, reported by The Intercept, is breathtaking in its scope and audacity. Attackers allegedly associated with the NSA and GCHQ, the British spy agency, were able to compromise a number of machines on the network of Gemalto, a global manufacturer of mobile SIM cards.
