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Re:A way to track people with cellphones with GPS capabiliti... by debatem1 on Monday July 16, 2018 @02:46AM (#17539246)
There is absolutely nothing novel about using a gyroscope for tracking location; doing so predates the American civil war by 10 years and is 76 years older than sliced bread. This is clickbait for the security set, and I'm ashamed cnbc fell for it.

Disclaimer: I've done work both on side channel attacks and Android security previously.

Re:A way to track people with cellphones with GPS capabiliti... by nradov on Monday July 16, 2018 @03:06AM (#17539324)
The novel part here appears to be doing shape matching against road maps to improve accuracy. The accelerometers and gyroscope in consumer devices are so inaccurate that any track will be mostly useless after a few minutes, but if they can periodically tie that data back to known map points then accuracy improves a lot.

I'd like to see navigation apps make use of this approach when then lose GNSS signals, like in a tunnel.

Re:A way to track people with cellphones with GPS capabiliti... by xvf22 on Monday July 16, 2018 @06:42AM (#17540193)
Interesting, the augmentation reminds me of the Etak Navigator [1] which took a similar approach to remove accumulated errors.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3047828/who-needs-gps-the-forgot...

Re:A way to track people with cellphones with GPS capabiliti... by maxerickson on Monday July 16, 2018 @07:33AM (#17540435)
"Snap to map" is often a setting.

It's a relatively well studied topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_matching

Re:A way to track people with cellphones with GPS capabiliti... by debatem1 on Monday July 16, 2018 @03:46AM (#17539470)
As the other reply says, this has been done for in-car systems at least since the late 90s. Heck, I had a company in the gnss space ask me this as an interview question probably 7 or 8 years ago.
Re:A way to track people with cellphones with GPS capabiliti... by bebna on Monday July 16, 2018 @03:36AM (#17539435)
In-car navigation systems do that, because they have access of stearing angles and speed.