FakeTraveler: Fake where your phone is located (Mock location for Android)
github.com
github.com
I use it to gamify (not games or such -) a lot of things, but it’s also used for “fraud” or such, one thing when I was researching was that Pokémon go users do this. I just do it for geoarbritage pricing - without a play account on google phones. IMO I don’t think google play follows geographic pricing like apple does with their store (address/credit card in other geographic region)
Coincidentally it’s harder to do the above on an iPhone.
One of the older methods worked, but semi-required the back of the phone to have aluminium foil on it so that the real GPS signal wouldn't get through and "rubberband" you back to your actual location, earning a soft-ban. I had more than one phone with a couple of layers of alfoil between the phone and the case.
There was another method that required a specific version of Google Play Services, so that root wasn't necessary. I think.
Also had to rename the FakeGPS app, and use Magisk Hide
Good times. I enjoyed "seeing if I could" more than the actual fruits of the labour.
The only way I can think of to prevent this is to build a faraday cage with a wired vpn router and your phone inside.
Poking into both of these systems outside of a lab is definitely a violation of the law ordinarily and it's pretty hard to test this in a lab.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/loss-of-popular-2fa-...
The main stumbling block here is that Google wants to tie users' hands in certain aspects, and many of these OSes are specifically designed to undo that control. GrapheneOS does a bunch of stuff to improve security that absolutely could be incorporated into a Play Integrity authorized build. But it also does a bunch of stuff in the name of user privacy that Google would never sign off on.
For example, there are apps[1] that refuse to work without a GPS lock, for a variety of reasons ranging from "I save money on streaming rights by only letting you watch in a specific country" to "I need to know if you're a criminal trying to stuff our banking app with stolen credentials in a foreign country we can't prosecute you in". Some of these reasons are pro-user, some are user-hostile[0], but all of them require handcuffing the user, so Android cooperates with app developers instead of you.
All the permitted ways for a user to manipulate their location are transparent to the application. That is, if you mock your location, the application is told it's fake and can refuse it. Likewise, if you turn off location, the application is told it didn't get a fix. Hardware killswitches are just a more powerful / legible way to turn off location. If the phone instead had a hardware GPS signal spoofer in it, Google would absolutely ban it from Play Integrity.
[0] And, for the user-hostile reasons, those are the terms of sale, so Google cooperating with the user would just get the app taken away because the entertainment conglomerates are big enough to oppose Google's market power.
[1] Client and server inclusive, i.e. "an app is just a website with enough IP to make it a felony to block ads in it". Play Integrity exists specifically to frustrate attempts to modify the client. If you modify the client or the OS it lives in, Play Integrity's signed data will have the wrong hashes in them, and the server will refuse service to you.
I don't think that's necessarily true. It's actually kind of confusing to me that Google doesn't whitelist GrapheneOS. According to their website [1]:
> GrapheneOS not only upholds the app security model but substantially reinforces it, so it cannot be justified with reasoning based on security, anti-fraud, etc.
Ever since I discovered this article, as a GrapheneOS user, I've felt sort of conflicted about it. On one hand, it would be good to see more apps support GrapheneOS. On the other hand, as a FOSS advocate, it irks me that I can't make arbitrary changes to my OS without taking the risk that certain apps might stop working for no reason [2].
It also places GrapheneOS in a bit of an awkward position as a open source project, where it's possible that they might be forced not to include certain features because they made this promise to banking apps. For example, they would probably not accept a location spoofing feature that can't be detected by app developers, because banking apps could no longer trust the OS-provided APIs.
But again on the other hand, this policy means it's not off the table that Google might whitelist GrapheneOS in Play Integrity one day, which I think would be a good thing (of course there's business interests at play here, but there's no valid non-business reason for them not to).
Overall, the entire mobile phone ecosystem depresses me. I just try to avoid using my phone as much as possible, and keep the number of installed apps to a minimum. I'll probably give the iPhone a try if they ever start allowing sideloading (wishful thinking). Unfortunately it seems like it may become unsustainable to avoid placing full trust in your phone's manufacturer, and I'd only be comfortable giving that to Apple, not Google or Samsung.
[1] https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...
[2] It should be noted that, as of today, I don't think any banking app has added explicit compatibility for GrapheneOS. AFAIK all the banking apps that work with GrapheneOS also work with any (non-rooted) open-source Android alternative. As a sidenote, I currently work around this issue entirely by simply using my bank's website instead of their silly app, and this will continue to work as long as hackers continue to fight against Google's dystopian plan for the web: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
First, prioritise if privacy really matter to you.
In a world where the iPhone exists and there's no effective regulations against their obvious anti-competive behavior (even the EU's DMA hardly did anything), I doubt any U.S. court will take them seriously, but I guess we'll see.
To wit: the EU already got rid of the whole "Android phone vendors must not ship incompatible forks" rule. They did this so long ago that all the comments on the news articles about it have aged like milk. Most of us were still complaining that the EU was unfairly targeting US tech companies, rather than cheering on the EU for unfairly targeting US tech companies. And in the US, Google has already lost in court, against Epic, on a lot of antitrust issues. It would not be that far of a stretch to go to a court and say Google not whitelisting Graphene[0] is anticompetitive, and the main reason why that hasn't happened is primarily because Graphene is a small project run by a developer that harassed Louis Rossmann over something stupidly petty.
[0] assuming there's a CDD-compliant version floating around out there
That being said, I have tried this for banking apps, and they aren't fooled by it, so I am guessing Android passes on that this is a "mock" location, not a real one.
Like you said, if you really want to fake it, probably a faraday cage/fake GPS would be necessary.
Especially for a device so personal as a smartphone.
There needs to be legislation that prevents manufactures from overridinf the will of the user at the behest of app makers for devices like this.
Consider caller ID - legislators around the world are working on making it harder to spoof your identity, because there's so much fraud going on with fake caller IDs.
It's the same with location. Being able to easily fake location would open the door to so many frauds...
- Not using GPS? Not an option because you need it
- Disabling permissions? Not possible for "system apps"
- Having the 10% privacy aware people block location somehow (via rooted phone or different distribution)? That doesn't help the other 90%.
IMO the only solution is to poison the data with fake locations.
Are there other options I missed?
Do I care? Like not to be glib but as an end user buying a phone for my personal uses, I dont care about their businesses and I loathe the idea that their business model requires such an anti feature to be widely deployed in personal devices such as smart phones.
Tell you what. I have a business model that requires your personal location data. Be a dear and send it to me.
And again, why do I care about caller ID. It's been trash for years. I just never answer calls and use diffetent platforms such as Signal to communicate with my friends.
It may open the door to so many frauds, but it opens the door to so many more abuses.
People will talk about these 'features' differently the first time a large genocidal action takes place that makes use of this data.
Mapping companies rely on the fact that their crowdsourced data is reliable.
Emergency services rely on the fact that phones share accurate locations.
Delivery companies require authentic location data from their agents.
Apps that allow people to rent scooters or bicycles rely on non-fake location data.
If you made it easy to provide fake location data, a lot of apps would suddenly have to deal with a whole new class of fraud. I just don't see how this would be a net beneficial change.
There's a way to fix this. Each bicycle can store a private key, and your phone needs to talk to the bike nearby to do a live challenge-response before you can rent it out.
Since I paid for my phone, I really don't see why it's incumbent on me to help the latter case out. A delivery company is free to supply a managed device or fit a device to their trucks. A crowdsourcing company should in any case already be assuming all client data is suspect and ensuring it's properly correlated with other sources of information.
There's no fraud here. The worst case outcome in your list is perhaps a delivery agent just having their phone say they've done a particular route when they just sat in the movie theatre or whatever, but the fact that none of their packages got delivered is enough to out them even if the shipping company is trying to get location data for free from a device the shipping company doesn't even own.
If I hire a bike I'm nowhere near I still pay for it. Denial of service attacks in which the perpetrator is fully responsible for the cost of resources consumed just aren't a thing that happens.
The only group involved in these scenarios that's taking adverse action against another party for their own gain is the entitled companies demanding users' phones be locked down so they can continue to get material gain from them without compensation. The net benefit here is that these companies' profits should definitely be taking a back seat to users' rights.
Consumers actually want to use services offered by companies, and willingly accept what you consider drawbacks. We want accurate traffic data in maps, and crowd-sourced key finders, and all the other conveniences afforded by unspoofable location data, and we give up a little bit of control in exchange for that.
Companies don't compensate us with money for crowdsourced data; they compensate us by offering services they couldn't offer otherwise.
The ‘us vs them’ mindset comes from ‘then’ determining what is acceptable for ‘us’ to do purely because it’s good for ‘them’.
If I want to set my location to somewhere I am not, and the only reason I can’t is corporate interests, then a battleground has been drawn up by those interests, not me.
Companies in general don't want reliable data for the fun of it; they want it in order to provide services that users want.
DRM doesn't work because it only takes one person to bypass it to make a copy, and caller ID verification doesn't work because it only takes one janky provider that doesn't implement SHAKEN/STIR correctly and yet is worth too much money to totally block.
FWIW I can still generate calls with arbitrary caller ID from a handful of my (legacy) ITSP providers, but if I get a new account today with any of them, they will require me to either verify each caller ID by receiving an inbound call or provide a "valid business justification" for why I can't do that. They are working on tightening up the pathways to generating fake caller IDs but in the telephony world, nothing moves fast and uptime is more important than anything, except maybe revenue, of which spam calls account for a ton.
Even if the device is unmodified, you can still spoof GPS signals by generating them in a box: https://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/4unzp2/cheatin... , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mC71c6zRUE . That's why I think "trusted computing" is pointless.
I was surprised there wasn't a bigger outcry over it in the tech world.
I've found that the Play Integrity Fix module for Magisk usually solves it, though there are a couple exceptions. They still earn a negative review for the attempt.
That's for the app developer to decide, no?
It's a recent change that app developers have the ability to know, and represents a massive transfer of power away from users to app developers and OS vendors.
I guess what I'm saying is that I see some degree of reasonableness in a bank or a mobile game enforcing some Trusted Computing paradigms, even if I don't like it. Banks have to worry about real money fraud, and games worry about cheating. In my opinion, the privacy and user agency tradeoffs are not worth it, but I see why they do it. For someone like McDonald's though, I just do not see any reason that they'd need this level of trust in their customers.
Buying fast food is historically a very low trust, transactional deal. Why does McD need to be able to ensure my device integrity to offer this? Starbucks doesn't need to do so, and they have a loyalty program with stored value and payment reload in the app.
Indeed, I'm okay with doing whatever I want, within standards of human decency, with my owned device and my owned bits therein. I don't see where McDonalds' desires factor into what I do with either.
Their technical capability of imposing control over how people use their own devices isn't self-justified, or justified at all.
But even in that remote possibility, I think it's even less likely that many folks sophisticated enough to root their phone would ever have that complaint.
I'm happy to be proven wrong with a sufficient amount of such complaints about the McDonald's app.
and because an online store is not able to discriminate on race, these protections are voided, because they could refuse based on proxies of race (for example, they could be using location to determine if you're likely going to cheat the delivery, or reverse credit charge, or fraud etc). it might sound reasonable to try prevent the fraud before it happens, but it is an abuse of a position/power they should not have.
The balance of power between a user and a service provider on the digital realm is swining towards the service provider. This needs to be addressed.
You spelled "spammers and personal data spies" wrong and it somehow ended up as "businesses"...
Anyway, spammers and data brokers probably wouldn't care at all if say 10% of people spoofed their location. They don't really have a lot to lose if some of their data is incorrect.
if the use cases are aligned with the user, they will give the correct location data.
Or a delivery driver: You want them to actually drive up to your house and ring your bell, rather than just pretend to drive there and drop your package somewhere else.
Location data is worth a lot more if it is reliable.
The user should be in control of sharing their location. But you shouldn't be able to just provide a fake location.
So you shouldn't be able to use the dating app to set up a date for when you're back home while on a business trip or holiday?
Maybe you should just upload proof of residence to the dating app instead. But I'm sure you'd consider THAT a violation of privacy, while 24/7 location tracking of your phone isn't because ... it's electronic?
By the way, do you want to give your exact location to a profile on a dating app? Even if they're local, maybe they're serial killers.
> Or a delivery driver: You want them to actually drive up to your house and ring your bell, rather than just pretend to drive there and drop your package somewhere else.
This other case is legitimate but it can be solved by issuing the driver a work device that has tracking.
Unfortunately the other 10000 cases are unneeded violations of privacy.
What I'm not fine with is one large corporation who makes phones baking this feature in so that other companies that make apps can profit off it. That's two parties conspiring to fuck over their customers.
That needs to be regulated.
There are apps whose name(s) i won't mention, that uses DRM to prevent screenshotting, and it's way harder to bypass.
Another option is to not be running an operating system that betrays your interests. Google can only determine your location using nearby wifi networks if that list of nearby wifi networks has been given to Google through Android/Play backdoors. In fact most privacy issues with phones boil down to running a malevolent OS - protecting against malicious application code is still a difficult problem, but it is at least tractable if you can trust the system code.
(Personally I think the functionality of the OP should be included by default as part of the OS permission system, and configurable on a per-application basis)
Running user-representing software on your phone doesn't fix all problems everywhere, it just gives you a platform with which you can address them to the fullest extent possible.
I would think they are certainly using phones to collect Wifi AP locations. In fact if they've stopped doing so with the mapping cars, then it's probably because the phone backhaul is good enough.
The ways of preventing this are much less straightforward though. Stopping your phone collecting them will only remove some datapoints (perhaps significant for some people, but not for most). Disabling AP beacons or continually rotating ssid/bssid can mitigate it for your own APs, but at the cost of some UX.
My office elevator is stainless steel on all sides and yet somehow Wi-Fi works inside. A miniscule amount of signal must be getting through a crack somewhere.
I don't know if turning off location tracking also stops the passive Wi-Fi scanning, let alone whether anything related to this is phoned home to the Google mothership, or whether Android devices are now part of a giant botnet tasked with improving Google's location services.
*Turning off Wi-Fi in Android now only has the effect of disconnecting any active wireless network connection, the radio stays on and the lower level of the wireless network stack remains running to facilitate the passive network scanning.
That raises more questions than it answers.
“Thou shall spy on thy family’s whereabouts no fewer than thrice hourly, and thou must use ReligionFamilyTracker™, at $19.99 per week, to do so.”
As in the Sade song, "Coast to coast, LA to Chicago... across the north, and south to Key Largo..."
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.dvilleneuve...
But
Why does doordash still know PRECISELY where the phone is? I turned off location permission for it, 'force stop'd it and then relaunched and reenabled precise, always ON Location sharing.
Shouldn't the app be fooled?
What gives?
So maybe it's just displaying the last known location, rather than somehow getting your current location?
It does say "gotta collect 'em all" pretty clearly...
However, I still remember the wave of people coming towards me when a Gyarados spawned right near me. I had some family with me who weren't playing (and therefore didn't know what was going on) and were quite intimidated by the sight of the approaching, stampeding crowd.
It struck me it wouldn't be too hard to use the same device to replay the WiFi data back to the phone to make it think you were on that journey. It would also require shielding to avoid access to GPS and to the real WiFi access points around. Eminently doable though I would think.
You can only change the Google Play country setting once a year. You can only change it if Google determine you to be located physically in that country. Based on my testing, the only combination I could use to trick them was:
* no SIM in the phone
* Wi-Fi connected to another phone's hotspot which is VPNing to the desired country
* GPS off
* payment method in the desired country
That way Google have no way of knowing you're not actually in the desired country. Just certain parts (even including a SIM card in roaming originally from desired country didn't work) weren't enough.
- Billing addresses for Google Play
- Wifi and cellular networks seen by your Android devices
- IP addresses and other identifiers of all devices you used to access Google services (mobile and web)
- GPS metadata in pictures uploaded to Google Images and Drive
- Documents with addresses such as bills in your Google Drive and Gmail
And probably much more that I can't think of right now.
The Google Play store country however can be changed once per year, but you need a valid billing method originating from this country.
- Installed Fake Traveller
- Set Fake Location App
- Set location to Sydney, Australia
- Open Play Store
- Search for ANZ Shield (Australian banking app)
Result: App not available in my region :(
Cellular baseband info?
∆ between reported locations exceeding some multiplier of a Google Maps reported trip length?
But once you've set it as at THE mock app you can't get your actual location to offset (maybe this has changed since.)
despite my attempts to make sure it ran correctly in the background it would always stop working after a while. That was the hard part at the time , making anything run in the background without the phone killing the process or eating the battery.
I would pay for an app that works properly, if only I could find one. Next time, I'll probably give this one a try.
A good mocking API should not let the things being mocked know that they are being mocked at.
You can modify a fork of Android to do this at the OS level, I suppose.
But I wonder if I could make a phone case that emits GPS signals that make my phone think it is in an arbitrary location but without interfering with anyone standing a reasonable distance away from me.