NEW DELHI: A new study from IIT-Delhi reveals that the humble GPS chip inside smartphones can disclose far more than a user’s location. It can also quietly indicate what someone is doing—whether sitting, walking, or flying—and even describe their immediate environment, such as whether they are indoors, outdoors, in a crowded area, or on a flight.
The work, led by Soham Nag, an MTech student, and Profesor Smruti R. Sarangi from Department of Computer Science and Engineering, introduces a system called AndroCon, which can extract detailed contextual information solely from GPS data. Their findings were published in the ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, one of the leading journals in privacy-aware sensing.
AndroCon is the first system to demonstrate that fine-grained GPS info already accessible to Android applications with “precise location” permissions can serve as a covert environmental sensor. Without relying on the phone’s camera, microphone, or motion sensors, the system analyses nine GPS parameters—such as Doppler shift, signal power, and multipath interference—to infer human activity and environmental context.
Using only this data, AndroCon can determine whether a user is sitting, standing, lying down, travelling in a metro, flying on an aircraft, or walking in a park. It can even detect whether a room is crowded or empty.