The researchers concluded that spyware maker NSO Group was using actual location data from thousands of people when it introduced the new Fleming system to the government and journalists to track the coronavirus.
NSO is a notorious company that is famous for selling Tianma spyware to the government. It launched its system earlier this year to help the government track the spread of the coronavirus.
Fleming reportedly allows the government to obtain location data from cell phone companies to visualize and track the spread of the virus.
NSO has shown Fleming technology to multiple news outlets, and according to NSO, these technologies can assist governments in making public health decisions without compromising privacy.
In May, a security researcher discovered a public database containing thousands of location data points that NSO used to illustrate how Fleming works.
The researcher briefed the company on this problem, which could protect the security of the database, but he said: The site data is not based on actual data.
NSO's claim that location data is incorrect differs from media reports that say: NSO uses location data obtained from data agents to train the system.
Privacy expert (Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler) said: NSO informed her that the data was obtained from a data broker that was selling a large amount of location data aggregated from applications installed on thousands of mobile phones. Access permission.
Researchers from the School of Forensic Medicine, an academic unit of the University of London, investigated and reviewed human rights violations and published their findings. They believed that the disclosed data was most likely based on real-world data on the page.
If the data were correct, the researchers say, NSO violated the privacy of 32,000 people in several countries.
The researchers analyze samples of the exposed location data by looking for patterns they would expect with location data from real people, for example b- the concentration of population in large cities and the time needed. It makes people move from one place to another.
Researchers have also found spatial irregularities related to real data, such as: phone models trying to locate when a satellite's line of sight is blocked by tall buildings.
The researchers said: It is possible that the dataset is not composed of fake or computer-generated data, but rather information that reflects true personal activity that may have been sourced from telecom companies or other sources.
The data can come from mobile apps that use a combination of real-time GPS data, nearby wireless networks, and the phones' built-in sensors to improve the quality of the location data.
NSO rejected the researchers' findings, saying: We have not seen so-called inspections and we want to know how to draw these results, but the experimental materials are not based on actual data from people infected with the Coronavirus.
She added, the Fleming System is a tool that can be used to analyze user-submitted data to assist healthcare decision-makers during a global pandemic. NSO does not collect any system data and NSO cannot access the collected data.
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| NSO Fleming Technology uses real-world location data |