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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[–] 22 points 20 hours 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 20 hours 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 19 hours ago (3 children)

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

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  • [–] 5 points 19 hours 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 17 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.

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  • [–] 9 points 20 hours ago (1 child)

    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?

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  • [–] 7 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

    The Hated One has a couple of videos on how a phone finds you location - there are 5 or 6 methods.

    Youtube https://youtu.be/WkmTxBTe52o

    Bitchute https://www.bitchute.com/video/WkmTxBTe52o

    I was going to post the link to his older video but it was made 6 years ago.

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  • [–] 8 points 16 hours ago

    ip, cellular, gps

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  • [–] 6 points 18 hours ago

    Your IP address is the easiest and most common way.

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