Usually in subways getting a signal on your phone can be a bit difficult meaning that if a hacker wanted to attack you, it would be pretty hard to try and grab ahold of your signal, or at least that’s what you think. According to research conducted by researchers from China, it seems that hackers can now track your movement not using GPS, but by using your phone’s accelerometer.The idea behind it is that every subway in the world has a unique fingerprint in the way it moves, meaning that assuming a hacker is privy to the way subways around the world works, they will know where you are and which line you are taking in which country. According to the researchers, they claim that “there are no two pairs of neighboring stations whose connecting tracks are exactly the same in the real world, the motion patterns of the train within different intervals are distinguishable as well.”
So why is this a big deal? If they can track you it doesn’t necessarily mean they can steal from you, right? First of all we suppose it has to do with violating our right to privacy – no one likes being tracked! Secondly the tracking could simply be a prelude to more nefarious actions. According to the researchers, it could let the hackers track your movements which could result in you being attacked physically by them if that’s what they were after.
It could also be used to determine your habits. “Another interesting example is that if the attacker finds Alice and Bob often visit the same stations at similar non-working times, he may infer that Bob is dating Alice.” While the research has yet to be peer reviewed, the researchers claim that so far based on their tests, they have been able to track subway riders with accuracy up to 92%.