The agency known for its own questionable surveillance activity advised how mobile users can limit others’ ability to track where they are.
Mobile devices expose location data in more ways than most people know, and turning off services such as Find My Phone, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth can help mitigate tracking, but are no silver bullet that prevents a third party from tracking users. That’s advice shared by U.S. top spy division, the National Security Agency (NSA).
The NSA released
the advisory (PDF) this week informing people of the various ways mobile phones, by design, give up location information—which go beyond the well-known Location Services feature that people use on a regular basis. The agency also provided some tips on how privacy-minded people can limit the ways they’re being tracked.
Indeed, cybercriminals have been known to take advantage of the ability of smartphones to pinpoint a person’s location in the form of security threats such as
stalkerware,
spyware, socially-engineered
phishing campaigns and others.
The NSA is in the business of collecting information and data for intelligence purposes using signals for the U.S. military and the intelligence community, and was notoriously outed by whistleblower
Edward Snowden in 2013 for collecting surveillance on citizens in the United States via their telephone and computer activity.
