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When GPS is spoofed in a smartphone, does this affect whatever is being monitored? Suppose I spoof the GPS on my smartphone, such as lazy Pokemon GO players do to play from their couch. Will this spoof be transmitted to a surveillance agency that could be monitoring the device? Or will it only affect the results on the device itself? i.e., can it be used to trigger a police raid on a specific false location?

schroeder
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Mark Besser
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    All of your scenarios use different types of location info gathering. And there is more than just GPS as a means of determining location. Are you asking about all types of location gathering, or just GPS? – schroeder Sep 25 '21 at 09:52
  • I would say there's no clear answer possible here. Who are "they" who (might) monitor it? "They" can be your mobile operator, government institutions, your employer, app owner etc. If we take your mobile operator, it may or may not preseve your location data based on GSM signal details - it will depend on government regulations, provider policies, and technical limitations it has. And this information will not depend on any tricks you do on your mobile: the moment you connect to the mobile network, it's gathered. – Alex Sep 25 '21 at 10:42
  • On the other hand, mobile operator or government entities are very unlikely to get location information from your phone itself, as it requires some presence there - for example, installed app or some spyware. But why would you have such app installed in the first place? If your issues with law went that far, I would say you should drop using smartphones completely. No Pokémon Go for criminals, they must suffer! – Alex Sep 25 '21 at 10:43
  • This question makes some odd suppositions. What information are you concerned about? What specific threat actors are you worried about having that information, and why? Please edit your question (small button below your post) to elaborate. – Polynomial Sep 25 '21 at 14:33

1 Answers1

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There are multiple layers to this.

When you "spoof" your location on e.g. Android (using the mock location debugging feature), you give the system's location provider a specified location. Any apps that are using the system's location provider will retrieve this specified location.

However, if the app is instead collecting names of surrounding WiFi networks and querying some external location API with that information, it would likely get your true location. The same goes for if it is able to see what cell tower you are connected to. Additionally, if an app has higher privileges than a normal app (e.g. running as root), it is likely that the mock location could be bypassed in any case.

On the other end, your cell phone network operator can see which tower(s) you are near and deduce your approximate location at any time. This is beyond your control as long as you are connected to the network.

multithr3at3d
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