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How did the app knew my location? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.world
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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?

Screencap of an app notification referencing the train station I just arrived
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[–] 23 points 1 day ago (8 children)

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.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    Highly doubt your address is static across carrier infra across countries.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day 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.

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