Fake GPS apps

[mattinkelowna]

In the news today, the Federal government is looking at tracking our whereabouts through our cellphone devices (so they can issue fines if we're caught in large gatherings or else).

Can apps such as FakeGPS throw them off track or would the cell tower still give them our real GPS coordinates?

https://www.businessinsider.com/countri ... rus-2020-3

[TylerM4]

In the news today, the Federal government is looking at tracking our whereabouts through our cellphone devices (so they can issue fines if we're caught in large gatherings or else).

Can apps such as FakeGPS throw them off track or would the cell tower still give them our real GPS coordinates?

Where is this in the news? I'd like to look at it more.

That's a pretty big invasion of privacy and not legal, I really doubt Canada's privacy commissioner would endorse. Plus the government is busy right now putting plans together to open things back up, they're not going to be motivated to implement controls to further enable lockdown.

Long story short - I highly doubt such an option is being seriously considered, but these are indeed crazy times.

To answer your question: The GPS app may work depending on the OS and design of the tracking app. But only if the tracking process uses the phone's GPS. Location via cellular tower is independent of the phone and there's nothing you can do to avoid that, but should be aware that location via cellular tower isn't very accurate - usually can't tell what building you're in for example.

Edit: Link has been added. This story is little more than fluff. No detail other than vague statements. From what I can see, the technologies mentioned in that article are anonymized. They allow the tracking and data gathering for "people" not named individuals. No different than hundreds of technologies already in place, many of which you already use.

[Jlabute]

As mentioned, triangulation through 4G cell towers is not accurate, but if your phone has a GPS receiver then location accuracy is about 1.5m. I don't think all cell phones have GPS but surely most newer ones do. 5G immensely improves cell tower positioning accuracy, just FYI.

Example of a GPS receiver. Small enough and available for anyone to embed.
https://www.digikey.ca/product-detail/en/stmicroelectronics/TESEO-LIV3F/497-18163-2-ND/9636209

The phone OS can read location information every second from this receiver chip and report it to a cell tower at what-ever required interval. Is location information stored in a non-protected memory space where it can be modified by a user application? Who knows. There seems to be a number of apps that do this so I suppose so. It is easy enough to test. if you are going to use it, I would maybe want to make sure that rough cell tower location is not 100's of Km away from GPS location... perhaps that would look weird.