MODS: The circumstances described below do NOT have to do with anything illegal, and I will elaborate via PM if desired.
I have a personal iPhone as many do, but for some work purposes I use a separate cell phone number.
Someone on my team inadvertently gave my personal cell number to someone I REALLY didn’t want to have it. This person will certainly share it with a great number of other people, none of whom I want to call me or know where I am.
I have turned off location services on my iPhone while I am working away from home.
My question is this–how possible is it for someone to track my home address down via cell number? I don’t live in the same area code as my cell number. Does turning off location services help me remain untrackable? Because it renders a lot of other “smartphone” services unusable and that is inconvenient.
The situation is such that I am willing to change my phone number if necessary. Obviously I would prefer not to. But if I do, is there a best way to remain anonymous on the new number?
So far as I know, without the help of law enforcement, a random person can’t track a phone with nothing more than the number. The only way, at least that I know, to track an iPhone is to log in to iCloud and do it from there. Even then, you have to have location services turned on.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure, even with location turned off, the location of your phone is known. If nothing else, your provider can see what tower(s) it’s pinging. I just don’t think a random person can do it without some help, like a warrant.
Yes, location services provides location information to apps running on your phone. It is these apps that might leak your information, but they won’t be doing it via your phone number. Facebook for instance can (and it seems probably does) track your location, for its own nefarious purposes. But unless you share your location on Facebook (say via the “checkin” function) it doesn’t publish the location for anyone else to see. People that see that information would need to have access to it via Facebook, not via your phone number. Other services - Uber and taxis apps for instance - will directly use your location information, and it will go to real people in a somewhat uncontrolled manner.
You can turn off location services on an app by app basis. Clearly something like the Maps app, or Google Maps, is going to need access to location if you want to navigate. It is always a good idea to control which apps are using your location information. Facebook has no reason to be given access that is of value to you. Similarly with many other apps. Turn access off to each app, and only enable on an app by app basis where there is a good reason to provide access. This is good practice for anyone. Nothing good comes from providing blanket access, there are only down sides.
Your phone location can be tracked by the carrier - they know which cell the phone is in, and can get further knowledge from antenna and timing information. But short of a warrant, nobody else gets access to that. And they already know your phone number, and your billing address.
In the modern world it is hard to stay hidden. Exposure of your phone number will only be a problem is you start to get unwelcome phone calls. Bocking numbers may help, but this only works so well. After which you have little choice but to change numbers. If someone really wants to find you they will, moblie phone number known or not.
It takes a bit of knowhow to do but it’s possible to unmask someone’s location given a phone number by posing as an ad buyer. iPhones are better at mitigating against this attack because you can selectively grant location services to only apps that have a legitimate need for them and which don’t serve 3rd party ads (eg: Google, Facebook & Snapchat).
How big of a problem is the fact that your phone number is now known by all those people? (Not because of anything else, just exactly because now they all know your number.)
If that in itself is not enough to make you change your number, I don’t think you need to be very worried about any of the other factors - just keep yourself safe
This thread is a good example of how this stuff is essentially a black box to many people. (That is, they know that location tracking exists but have no idea how it might work).
Francis Vaughan’s post has lots of good information (IMHO). Shalmanese’s point is valid and well taken. However, it’s still not straightforward to find someone’s location in the manner described in the linked article.
Tracking someone that way requires that they get your mobile advertising ID (MAID). This further requires that they either get their hands on your unlocked phone or that they sniff your Wi-Fi traffic while you’re connected to an unsecured access point. This means they’d have to be close enough to you pick up your phone while it’s unlocked or to be on the same Wi-Fi network–and that network would have to be one that doesn’t require a password[sup]1[/sup]. Then they’ve got to sift through all of the collected MAIDs they found and try to figure out which one goes with your phone number.
None of these steps is very challenging from a technical perspective, but someone would have to be pretty motivated to string all those steps together. The article mentions a jealous spouse, and this seems like someone who might realistically try to do this, if he/she were both jealous and fairly technically savvy.
The OP doesn’t give enough information to guess how motivated anyone is to figure out his/her location. But to to answer the original question, a phone number alone isn’t enough to track your location.
The tracking methods discussed here require that someone either guess your iCloud password or follow you around to several coffee shops. These are both definitely possible but also both fairly unlikely.
No one can guard against every attack, so it makes sense to guard against the most likely ones first. For most people, it’s pretty unlikely that anyone would try to figure out your home address from your phone number. If a standard reverse lookup fails, it’s much easier to simply follow you home from work. Just like Francis Vaughan said, someone who really wants to find you doesn’t need your mobile number to do so. It’s not even all that helpful.
[sup]1[/sup] WPA2, by far the most common encryption scheme for non-corporate Wi-Fi networks, uses a unique encryption key for each client on the network. So even if someone is on the same password-protected wireless network as you are, they can’t sniff your traffic. Older protocols like WEP don’t do this, but encrypted networks using WEP aren’t very common these days. if the coffee shop’s network person is smart enough to turn on encryption, they’re generally smart enough to use WPA2. Besides, it’s often the default.
This is one of many reasons why I’m baffled when I read the oft-repeated advice to always use a VPN when on public wi-fi (lest someone sniff your passwords). The attackers you guard against by doing so are exceedingly rare; web sites that send passwords in the clear are also exceedingly rare. Rather than paying monthly for a VPN account, invest that effort in installing something like the HTTPS-everywhere browser plugin. Oh, and don’t use telnet.
I’ve never heard of that, but reading the article it doesn’t sound like something your random creepy co-worker could easily do and get all that much useful info about your location.
If location tracking was on, you’d be better to just use a little social engineering to get them logged into gmail or icloud on something you own…or just following them around IRL.
I use social media very rarely and never on my phone. I have location services turned off on all apps except for a few that are allowed to use them “when app is in use” like Lyft. So it seems like my exposure is minimal.
My concern was more about my family than myself, but it sounds as though it would be pretty hard to locate me/my home from a phone number alone.
There’s also the possibility they could narrow down geography from your IP address if somehow they got you talking on some internet app while on WiFi -“Oh, look - that’s the IP for the Starbucks on the corner of Fifth and Main - no not that one, the Starbucks on the opposite corner…” But for the average Joe, finding the location of home IP addresses is not any easier than tracking cellphones…
In thinking about it, the folks who I’d rather not have my phone number already know my name and other information about me. So it’s sort of moot. They will either track me down and give me a hard time (unlikely) or they won’t. I do appreciate the responses, very useful and thanks to all.