Even when you’re lost, your device knows where you are

What is your most sensitive personal information? Your credit card number? Social Security number? TechMan believes it is your location.

While a stolen credit card or Social Security number can result in financial loss, your location data can put you at the scene of a crime or in the driveway of your paramour during a divorce proceeding.

Where you are now and where you have been tells a lot about your habits, your buying habits, your daily routine. If you go to a coffee shop frequently, you like coffee; if the library, you are a reader; if the bar, you are a drinker.

Your mobile device has a GPS system that knows exactly where you are at any given time. This information can be extracted from your phone and be sold or shared.

Even if you turn off GPS, your location is being mapped. Cell towers listen for a call to or from your phone. As the phone changes location, the antenna towers monitor the signal, and the phone is “roamed” to an adjacent tower. By comparing the

relative signal strength from multiple antenna towers, a location of a phone can be roughly determined. Newer phones may also allow location tracking even when no call is being made.

Your phone also checks for nearby Wi-Fi connection points and sends them to the phone maker.

Omnipresent cameras capture your image and store it with a time stamp that shows when and where the photo or video was taken. Using multiple cameras, your route can be traced. Watching you are security cameras, street cameras, red light cameras and devices on police cars that can scan license plates as they drive by. Where and when your car was spotted is sent to a database.

Facial recognition software makes it possible to pick you out of a crowd.

The E-ZPass system used by many states to collect road tolls keeps a database of when your car passed by a specific toll booth.

All this location data is stored by your cell service provider, in a law enforcement database, in a turnpike commission database, on saved recordings of cameras, by the maker of your phone or on your phone itself.

This stored map of your digital footprints can be shared, sold for advertising or turned over to law enforcement.

Recently, there has been some recognition of the need to restrict access to your location data.

The Supreme Court ruled last week that police must obtain a warrant from a judge to access phone location information from cell phone carriers. That means they must be able to show probable cause.

Apple has quietly been cracking down on apps in its app stores that share your location data with third parties without your permission, says 9to5Mac.

Google expects to release a patch sometime in the next few weeks to fix a bug in its Home smart speaker and Chromecast TV streaming stick that lets a website collect user location data, according to a report from security reporter Brian Krebs.

So even if you are totally lost, like TechMan often is, someone knows where you are.