Beware of find-my-phone, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, NSA tells mobile users

The National Security Agency is recommending that some government workers and people generally concerned about privacy turn off find-my-phone, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth whenever those services are not needed, as well as limit location data usage by apps.“Location data can be extremely valuable and must be protected,” an advisory published on Tuesday stated. The New York Times also published this sobering feature outlining services that use mobile location data to track the histories of millions of people over extended periods.The advisory also warns that tracking often happens even when cellular service is turned off, since both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth can also track locations and beam them to third parties connected to the Internet or with a sensor that’s within radio range.To prevent these types of privacy invasions, the NSA recommends the following:If it is critical that location is not revealed for a particular mission, consider the following recommendations:Patrick Wardle, a macOS and iOS security expert and a former hacker for the NSA, said the recommendations are a “great start” but that people who follow the recommendations shouldn’t consider them anything close to absolute protection.“As long as your phone is connecting to cell towers, which it has to in order to use the cell network... iOS also does a good job of randomizing MAC addresses that, when static, provide a unique identifier for each device.More recent versions of Android also allow the same location permissions and, when running on specific hardware (which usually come at a premium cost), also randomize MAC addresses.Both OSes require users to manually turn off ad personalization and reset advertising IDs. In iOS, people can do this in Settings > Privacy > Advertising.