Your smartphone comes with built-in location services, which are useful if you lose it or if you use an app that needs to know your location. But what if you don’t want your phone to be tracked? Can the phone be located if you turn off location services? The answer is yes, it’s possible to track mobile phones even if location services are turned off.
Turning off the location service on your phone can help conceal your location. This is important if you don’t want third parties knowing where you are or being able to track your movement. However, a smartphone can still be tracked through other techniques that reveal its general location.
This article explains how your phone can be tracked and what you can do to enhance your mobile security.
How can a phone be tracked?
Whether you have an iOS or Android phone, there are ways it can be tracked even if location services are turned off. You may have used some of these yourself to find a lost or stolen phone. For example, the Find My iPhone app uses Bluetooth to help you find an iPhone even if it’s offline.
If you have an Android phone and the Find My Device app, you can log in to your Google account and use Google Maps to check your phone’s location history.
Here are four ways that your phone could be tracked:
Cell towers
The United States has more than 307,000 phone tracked location services
