How does one enter coordinates on that device? I'd guess that as an offset from your location ("200m north of my position") might be the easiest way. If that's the case, then starting with a zero offset would be the logical choice.
You'd hope they would add some sort of safety to prevent this sort of thing, though.
No, because your solution will be off by that offset. eg. if the offset is 1KM to the north, and you tried the method mentioned in the blog post then your final solution will also be 1KM to the north. You can still use the information for limited stalking purposes (eg. has the person moved or not), but it's not nearly as useful as knowing their exact location.
This is something the phone of each user itself could do. All that is necessary is for the app to generate a random offset for the latitude and another one for the longitude at startup then report their location + constant offset instead of their actual location to Tinder.
Now the worst thing that will happen is someone triangulates a point say, 1/4 mile away from you.
If it's based on GPS, you could get a rough idea of where north was for the user, on average, while they were moving. It would be very static and wouldn't lend well to this sort of interface.
If all you have is WiFi- or cell-tower-based location, then you're not going to be able to get enough precision to make the value meaningful.
I wasn't aware. I thought coordinates were drawn from wifi as accuracy plummets if I turn that off. Or stops working entirely when its off as well as data. Maybe I've been imagining things.
And if you don't like getting off your ass, just spoof your GPS location.
Some dude did exactly this with tinder and got precise location. Iirc they mitigated by using grids after that, and precision is only accurate to a specific tile. However, a fixed tile size will anonymize you only as much as population density allows. If you're in a rural area, you'll likely be pinpointed.
Technologically I don't see why that couldn't be done. Transmit known coordinates, do a rough estimate of your distance using signal strength, and add that to the position error. If you get lat/lon from another device and it looks like that device is 300ft away, then your position is lat/lon ± 300ft.
It could be tricky to do securely. How do you prevent a malicious device from spoofing bad location data?
Android and iOS do something sort of like this already, determining position by looking WiFi base stations with known locations and attempting to do some triangulation. This can speed up a fix if the GPS signal is having trouble, and can be essential for indoor location because GPS signals don't penetrate structures well at all. My understanding is that the database gets built up by the devices. When they have a good location fix, they'll report back on the WiFi base stations they see, so that the mothership can build a database of where the things are. This is a little bit like what you describe, but with a really roundabout data path.
If it is exactly 1 km you could triangulate to find someone's location.
A program to do that would do a bisection search along a line (faking coordinates for the location of the device) to find the point on the line where you transition to seeing the person's messages. Then, repeat along other two lines in different directions. Each transition point gives a circle of 1 km radius on which the person is present, and the one point shared by all three circles is their location.
This could be mitigated by rounding off coordinates to be coarse enough that it doesn't give their precise location before calculating the distance.
If that's the case, they wouldn't need to report the location back to themselves, would they? The phone would simply check its coordinates, and turn it on or off.
I actually mentioned this in another reply. I never tried but it should work in an android emulator - set the GPS coordinates to something interesting - of course, something that won't potentially get you in trouble.
None. Any app that can lookup your words can show you the coords.
The only justification is the ease of communication over the phone.
I only don't like that it's proprietary and the company responsible is pretty aggressive about enforcing their rights - there shouldn't be a place for that in public emergency services.
There are apps to "fake" your location so maybe you can find a suitable one. I never used one but my external Bluetooth GNSS device feeds its accurate location into Android the same way. Please share if you do find a good one!
Most users will let the site use their device’s gps. Having the first step to be ”input your gps coordinates” would alienate a HUGE portion of the possible users.
It’s easy to measure statistics of a device noising among several grid cells to find with high probability the exact coordinate. Think of a person standing right where grid lines intersect, so with 25% probability each time the position will be reported to be one of four neighboring cells (due to errors in GPS measurement), which gives their exact location right on the intersection. If the probability weights’ distribution is different, it’s easy to infer the coordinate as well. Or if the person is moving, you can build their trajectory with high confidence.
It’s not that easy to obfuscate the coordinate in a way that the position is still relatively accurate (for the purpose of distance), and not “hackable” with some basic statistics.
You'd hope they would add some sort of safety to prevent this sort of thing, though.
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