Deceiving Eavesdroppers by Real Time Persistent Spoofing of Android Users’ Location Coordinates for Privacy Enhancement

Abstract

Location-based services have exponentially escalated in the past few decades. They appear to be very practical, however, the location of user is constantly being tracked, hoarded, and monitored by tech giants without user knowledge and consent. Google keeps an eye on every motion of its users, irrespective of their security settings. For this study, various Android smartphones were carried through different places for one week without the availability of internet and location services. Later, thorough network traffic analysis revealed that the archived data collected by Google apps and services, contained location data as well. This data is transferred to Google as soon as the internet connection becomes available. Moreover, a detailed performance analysis of existing fake GPS location applications was conducted that revealed a plethora of weaknesses in their performance and none of them aimed to secure users’ real location coordinates. In this paper, we present an interesting solution to obfuscate Android users’ real location coordinates, even in off-line mode, thereby, guaranteeing location privacy.