Your Uber Tracking Device Is Now Active
medium.com
medium.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16000550 https://hackerone.com/reports/293359
Let's see how long it takes OP to realize he opened the app and it persisted a location Thu Nov 30 2017 20:04:08 ("gps_time_ms":1512072248998) when location service were turned on.
This only shows that a coordinate pair is being sent to the Uber API, which may have been cached from a time in the past, such as last time a ride was requested. The author counters this only by driving away in attempt to “reset” it, but instead of sniffing the traffic to see that the headers changed to reflect the new coordinates, they reached their conclusion by returning home and sniffing the traffic and saw that the coordinates remained the same.
For this to work as described, something in iOS would have to be incredibly broken.
> there is a red push pin right on top of literally the room I am sitting in in the house using Google Maps Satellite View.
why not step outside and try again, see if it moves. or is that room just where he spends most of his time with the phone location services turned on connected to wifi...?
Not saying it's likely, just something that he should probably attempt to disprove before declaring that the Uber app is sneakily using your GPS after you tell your phone to turn it off.
I don't believe there's a public API for this on iOS. In order to use wifi hotspots to assist with GPS on iOS, you'd have to have location services enabled for the app.
That being said, it's very possible the app is just holding onto the last coordinates it was able to receive when location services was enabled for the app. This may be the default sane behavior to allow it to boot faster, as it'll be able to show/use the previously cached location to load maps, rather than waiting for a GPS fix to be acquired.
The author's test case of booting waze at a different location and then seeing if uber picks up that location after traveling away from it, without booting up the app is probably bogus, as unless granted, uber does not have access to location in background, and thus will not be able to access new location data while the app is not running. Once location services is disabled again, and the app is booted, the app should not see the previous location a GPS fix was able to be acquired (as that would break the implicit guarantee that an app using location services w/o background permissions should only see where you are currently, and not where you have been).
It's my suspicion this data is probably not directly used, and rather is used to enrich analytic events emitted internally within uber.
There actually was a way to do this. It no longer works as of iOS 11 though.
It seems he's pointing out that, even if you turn off location services, any app can just get around that by locating you via wifi. Isn't that worrisome, even if not unique to Uber?
Thing is, possibly as a result, Apple blocked ARP access in iOS 11. You can no longer get the BSSID and use that to get user location. Because the post indicates he used an iOS 11 device, this leads me to believe the coordinates were also not obtained with Wi-Fi information.
Does anyone know the method for doing this? 1) without jailbreaking and 2) bypassing certificate pinning on iOS.
I'm not saying it's right, just saying that it exists and everyone has a lot of down to the street location information about you all day.
Bringing up compensation, even in a round about way like that "pro bono" qualifier, sounds like a great way of getting chased for extortion.
The submitter mentioned something along these lines, if I understand correctly, in his only other HN submission.