New research reveals battery power alone can be used to track phones

A new study has revealed that Android phones can be tracked by just studying their battery power use overtime.

Without the use of GPS or wi-fi data, the researchers say that the Android phone can be found by calculating the power use of the phone.

According to the research, the further away a phone is from its cellular base, the more power it uses and the more obstacles are in its way as it reaches for a signal. Other powers used up by other activities are calculated with algorithms.

The researchers- Yan Michalevsky, Dan Boneh and Aaron Schulman, from the computer science department at Stanford University, along with Gabi Nakibly, from Rafael Ltd -therefore created an app that has been designed to collect data without power consumption.

"The malicious app has neither permission to access the GPS nor other location providers (eg cellular or wi-fi network). We only assume permission for network connectivity and access to the power data. These are very common permissions for an application, and are unlikely to raise suspicion on the part of the victim," the team of researchers writes in their paper.

The team of researchers adds that there are 179 apps currently available on Android app store Google Play that request this information.

Listening to music, activating maps, taking voice calls or using Twitter, Facebook all drain the battery but do not distort the algorithms that leads to the tracking.

"Intuitively the reason why all this noise does not mislead our algorithms is that the noise is not correlated with the phone's location. Therefore a sufficiently long power measurement (several minutes) enables the learning algorithm to 'see' through the noise,” the team says.

The tests were carried out on phones using the 3G network but did not measure signal strength as that data is protected by the device.