5 More Ways Your Location Can Be Tracked

Courtesy of the New York Times , we just gotanother reminderof how encroaching localisation get across through apps can be — which might have make you to turn off this special license for a bunch of apps on your smartphone . But locating tracking goes a mess deeper than that .

Here are five way that apps , companies , and marketer can know where you ’ve been , even after you ’ve handicapped location permissions inside your favorite apps . We ca n’t enjoin you exactly how this data point is used , but we can give you some thought about how it ’s collect from you .

1) Logging into websites

Every time you lumber into Gmail , Amazon , Facebook , or anywhere else , these websites recognize where you ’re browse from , more or less speaking . In some situations , this is utile — to recognise unusual and unauthorized logins , for instance — but it all adds to the data tip that these business firm have on you and which they might take to sell on to other interested parties .

When you ’re online , you ’ll be revealing a public IP address bind to your cyberspace Service Provider ( ISP ) , which is tie to your rough geographical area . On its own , it ’s not enough to reveal exactly where you live , but it can be tied to other bits of information to learn more about you . It ’s why you ’ll sometimes see online ads for your local domain even when you ’re not sign in anywhere .

In other Holy Scripture , even if you have n’t severalise Facebook your home city , it credibly fuck ( see herefor the locations of your current Facebook logins ) . The only tangible way of life around this is touse a Virtual individual connection(VPN ) service , which can plug into to the web through a node that ’s not at all related to to your current location — it could even be on the other side of the public . internet site will still be able to log an IP when you sign into them , but it wo n’t be a geographically accurate one .

Photo: David Nield (Gizmodo)

2) Tagging your photos

As you might already know , if you tag a space in an Instagram , Snapchat , Facebook , or Twitter exposure , that localisation gets linked to your account and your identity . You should think very carefully about geotagging your pictures , particularly if they are being published publicly , and especially if they ’re around your dwelling or home of work .

Even if you do n’t brand these range for the world at prominent to see though , the placement datum can still be logged and share with whatever datum partners your apps are bring with . As we saw in the NYT report , this data point is often described as anonymized in most privacy insurance policy , but it ’s not too hard for someone to fall in the loony toons .

It gets bad though : Even if you do n’t geotag your photos publicly , and disable an app ’s location license , it can still ferment out where you ’ve been if you accord it access to your photos . As developer Felix Krauserevealed last yr , if an app can access your picture program library ( kind of essential for Instagram and Snapchat ) , it can also read the locating metadata linked to your existing photos , and see the spots you take pictures in .

Screenshot: David Nield

Screenshot: David Nield

3) Logging into wifi

We ’re often so desperate for some salutary , impregnable wifi that we ’ll click through no end of consent boxes and warning dialogs , just to get online at a hotel or a coffee shop . Public wireless fidelity is insecureat the best of prison term , but you ’re also giving away your location whenever you log into a connection that ’s not your own .

We ca n’t speak for every public wifi operator out there in the world , but we do know that allowing your email address or phone number to be tie in to the connection might well be one of the conditions of access . Companies do n’t often extend wifi out of the good of their hearts — they do it to make money from adman who want to advertise to you , and to do that they want to have a go at it more about where you are .

Sure , no one will be able-bodied to haunt you ground on two coffee shop check - ins a calendar month . But data brokers are experts are building up profiles of the great unwashed based on disparate reference of information , and public wifi admittance can bung into that . If you could , only lumber into other wifi networks if you trust the multitude running them .

Photo: Sam Rutherford

Photo: Sam Rutherford (Gizmodo)

4) Posting your fitness data

This one is related to apps , and particularly fitness apps , but perhaps not in the direction you intend — you might think theanonymized information dumpreleased by Strava that revealed some of the placement of privy military basis , or thePolar Flow API hackthat could be used to get at users ’ location information , even if that data was n’t published in public .

Now if you want to track your run around the park , then you ’re going to have to give your fitness app of pick access to your positioning — it ’s a business deal - off . But beyond that , it ’s also worth considering where you ’re posting the map of these outpouring , whether that ’s to other substance abuser inside the app on or social networks like Facebook .

We ’ve already spoken about companies and individuals being able to get in touch the acid between chopine , so if you ’re link up Strava ( for example ) to Facebook ( for example ) , you ’re adding to the location data that both of those apps do it . The fewer connections you have been apps the unspoilt , from a concealment viewpoint .

Argentina’s President Javier Milei (left) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., holding a chainsaw in a photo posted to Kennedy’s X account on May 27. 2025.

5) Turning on your phone

Even if you tack off location tracking on all your speech sound apps , your phone itself is still going to catch as much placement datum as it can from you — it ’s just part of the mickle of possess a gimmick made by Google or Apple , or indeed any roving equipment at all . It ’s essential for avail like discover your earpiece when it ’s lose , or build certain you ’re always connected to the near cell tower , or automatically setting the right time zone .

Unless you want to go back to a dumb sound life , this positioning information is sort of necessary . To halt your iPhone logging locations full stop , go to setting then tap Privacy and Location Services , and turn Location Services off . On Android , go to configurations then Security & location , Location , and sprain Use localization off .

Of of course how Apple and Google use this data is a whole other conversation : Encrypted and anonymized the data may be , but it ’s still collect . While Apple like to indicate out it does n’t deal data to advertisers on the scale of Google , even Apple’sprivacy policyadmits this geographic data point is shared with “ partners ” and is used to show advertising in Apple News and the App Store .

William Duplessie