GPS guides us to places or help us track our online orders. But the “fine-grained” data collected by it on Android smartphones can reveal far more than just the location, quietly exposing a person’s activity, environment or even layout of the room they are in, according to a study conducted by IIT-Delhi.

The study titled, “AndroCon: An Android Phone-based Sensor for Ambient, Human Activity and Layout Sensing using Fine-Grained GPS Information” has been published in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, a top journal in the field of privacy-aware sensing.

The researchers proposed AndroCon, the first system to demonstrate that the “fine-grained” Global Positioning System (GPS) data already accessible to Android apps with precise location permissions can act as a covert sensor.

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