Phones are giving away your location, regardless of your privacy settings

Sensors in your phone that collect seemingly harmless data could leave you vulnerable to cyberattack, according to new research. And saying no to apps that ask for your location is not enough to prevent the tracking of your device.

A new study has found evidence that accelerometers -- which sense motion in your smartphone and are used for applications from pedometers to gaming -- leave “unique, trackable fingerprints” that can be used to identify you and monitor your phone.

Here’s how it works, according to University of Illinois electrical and computer engineering professor Romit Roy Choudhury and his team: Tiny imperfections during the manufacturing process make a unique fingerprint on your accelerometer data. The researchers compared it to cutting out sugar cookies with a cookie cutter -- they may look the same, but each one is slightly, imperceptibly different. When that data is sent to the cloud for processing, your phone’s particular signal can be used to identify you. In other words, the same data that helps you control Flappy Bird can be used to pinpoint your location. Choudhury’s team was able to identify individual phones with 96% accuracy.