Article by Tommy Cooke et al: “Smartphones determine your location in several ways. The first way involves phones triangulating distances between cell towers or Wi-Fi routers.
The second way involves smartphones interacting with navigation satellites. When satellites pass overhead, they transmit signals to smartphones, which allows smartphones to calculate their own location. This process uses a specialized piece of hardware called the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) chipset. Every smartphone has one.
When these GNSS chipsets calculate navigation satellite signals, they output data in two standardized formats (known as protocols or languages): the GNSS raw measurement protocol and the National Marine Electronics Association protocol (NMEA 0183).
GNSS raw measurements include data such as the distance between satellites and cellphones and measurements of the signal itself.
NMEA 0183 contains similar information to GNSS raw measurements, but also includes additional information such as satellite identification numbers, the number of satellites in a constellation, what country owns a satellite, and the position of a satellite.
NMEA 0183 was created and is governed by the NMEA, a not-for-profit lobby group that is also a marine electronics trade organization. The NMEA was formed at the 1957 New York Boat Show when boating equipment manufacturers decided to build stronger relationships within the electronic manufacturing industry.
In the decades since, the NMEA 0183 data standard has improved marine electronics communications and is now found on a wide variety of non-marine communications devices today, including smartphones…
It is difficult to know who has access to data produced by these protocols. Access to NMEA protocols is only available under licence to businesses for a fee.
GNSS raw measurements, on the other hand, are a universal standard and can be read by different devices in the same way without a license. In 2016, Google allowed industries to have open access to it to foster innovation around device tracking accuracy, precision, analytics about how we move in real-time, and predictions about our movements in the future.
While automated processes can quietly harvest location data — like when a French-based company extracted location data from Salaat First, a Muslim prayer app — these data don’t need to be taken directly from smartphones to be exploited.
Data can be modelled, experimented with, or emulated in licensed devices in labs for innovation and algorithmic development.
Satellite-driven raw measurements from our devices were used to power global surveillance networks like STRIKE3, a now defunct European-led initiative that monitored and reported perceived threats to navigation satellites…(More)”.