I’m traveling to Barcelona and when I leave the train and walk on the platform I receive a notification from Cabify (Like Uber/Lyft) referencing the station where I am.

I only gave permissions of location only when using the app, and I did not used it in months.

How is it possible?

  • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    23·
    15 hours ago

    Your public IP is the one of the closest cell tower, but thats only enough to narrow it down to a city/neighbourhood. So probably by scanning the nearby wifi networks if it has network permissions.

    • roofuskit@lemmy.worldEnglish
      71·
      13 hours ago

      Is this an iPhone thing? Because Bluetooth and WiFi are tied to location permissions on Android because they can be used to determine your location.

    • ILikeTraaaains@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      13 hours ago

      The location by IP is useless in my case, it usually says I’m in Barcelona, when I don’t even live in this region, and now that I’m there it says that Im in another city. 😅

    • HelloRoot@lemy.lolEnglish
      3·
      15 hours ago

      It’s not like that for me.

      I was in another country recently (not neighbouring mine, there were 5 other countries in between)

      And when on mobile data my ip location was the location of my telco, back in my home country.

        • ladel@feddit.ukEnglish
          5·
          14 hours ago

          Your public IP will be where it exits the carriers’ private networks, right?. I learned about roaming in GSM networks long ago, and it at least used to be that all the traffic went through your home network if you’re roaming abroad. If that’s still the case, it would make sense to have a home IP even if abroad.

          I don’t believe each cell tower will have its own public IP, because if they did, cellular handover and all the clever stuff going on hidden from the users would be even more complex. Also exposing cell towers to the public internet sounds like a disaster.

        • HelloRoot@lemy.lolEnglish
          2·
          12 hours ago

          You can doubt all you want, but I’m just telling you exactly how it is. I checked it in multiple ip location check services. They gave me an IP that was geolocated to my telco providers city.

  • Great Blue@infosec.pubEnglish
    10·
    15 hours ago

    Could be a Bluetooth beacon. Even if you turned Bluetooth “off” your phone still receives signals. Or the app can access the cell tower information even with location turned off.

    Is your phone an Android or iPhone?

  • Artwork@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    13 hours ago

    Wonderful day!

    I have no experience in iPhone much, like at all… but is it possible the app monitors Wi-Fi networks?
    Also, I’ve just checked some documentation for the quite, sorry, limited and opinionated iOS environment:

    UNLocationNotificationTrigger
    A trigger condition that causes the system to deliver a notification when the user’s device enters or exits a geographic region you specify…

    Create a UNLocationNotificationTrigger object when you want to schedule the delivery of a local notification when the device enters or leaves a specific geographic region. The system limits the number of location-based triggers that it schedules at the same time…

    Because the system actually monitors the regions, you don’t need to request always permissions for your app…

    Source

    So, it may receive “notifications” while in background (not “when using the app”), too, it seems like.

    There should be “App Privacy Report” for apps in settings (source), where location request history should be listed, too.

    The ineffably marvelous Spain is a European country, so they should support GDPR, and you may write the organization about your location data stored/processed, to clarify it.