Researchers in Denmark say that it’s child’s play to track your Android phone via Wi-Fi even if the Wi-Fi is nominally turned off — and even if you didn’t let an app track your location.

Apps distributed via Google Play have to enumerate the precise permissions they require in order to function — something simple like a flashlight doesn’t (or shouldn’t, anyway) require anything more than access to the camera, so that it can use the flash. More complicated apps with deeper features might need more extensive permissions, including access to the phone’s location data, whether that’s obtained via GPS or Wi-Fi.

However, said Technical University of Denmark Ph.D student Piotr Sapiezynski and his team in a paper published last week, any apps that have access to Wi-Fi connection information can easily track the physical locations of their users, even if the specific permission for location tracking wasn’t given

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