Dashcam Flaw Allows Anyone To Track Drivers In Real-Time Across the US

guest · Jan 17, 2020

This App Lets Us See Everywhere People Drive
The creators say it shouldn’t be possible to track its users in bulk; we found otherwise
January 16, 2020
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxedxb/blackvue-dashcams-users-location-tracked

An app that is supposed to be a fun activity for dashcam users to broadcast their camera feeds and drives is actually allowing people to scrape and store the real-time location of drivers across the world.

BlackVue is a dashcam company with its own social network. With a small, internet-connected dashcam installed inside their vehicle, [...] Customers can also allow others to tune into their camera's feed, letting others "vicariously experience the excitement and pleasure of driving all over the world," a message displayed inside the app reads.

But what BlackVue's app doesn't make clear is that it is possible to pull and store users' GPS locations in real-time over days or even weeks. Motherboard was able to track the movements of some of BlackVue's customers in the United States.
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The news highlights privacy issues that some BlackVue customers or other dashcam users may not be aware of, and more generally the potential dangers of adding an internet and GPS enabled device into your vehicle.

"I don't think people understand the risk," Lee Heath, an information security professional and BlackVue user told Motherboard. [...] "You can have it automatically connect and upload when events happen. But I had no idea about the sharing" before receiving the device as a gift, he added.
Ordinarily, BlackVue lets anyone create an account and then view a map of cameras that are broadcasting their location and live feed.

But the actual GPS data that drives the map is available and publicly accessible.
By reverse engineering the iOS version of the BlackVue app, Motherboard was able to write scripts that pull the GPS location of BlackVue users over a week long period and store the coordinates and other information like the user's unique identifier.

With that data, we were able to build a picture of several BlackVue users' daily routines [...]
Click to expand...

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Dashcam Flaw Allows Anyone To Track Drivers In Real-Time Across the US

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