Fingerprinting iPhones - identifying your unique phone's 'fingerprint'

Governments will use whatever technology is available to surveil their primary enemy, that being their very own domestic population, their tax payers, the people that they are allegedly supposed to serve.

THE best surveillance device at this point in time, is the smartphone that the masses fully sponsor in order for corporations and government players to spy them.

With the current sensors crammed into smartphones, data is generated to uniquely identify the device together with its user and the environment independent from location services.

See article from schneier.com of the headline:

Fingerprinting iPhones

This clever attack allows someone to uniquely identify a phone when you visit a website, based on data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer sensors.

We have developed a new type of fingerprinting attack, the calibration fingerprinting attack. Our attack uses data gathered from the accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer sensors found in smartphones to construct a globally unique fingerprint. Overall, our attack has the following advantages:

• The attack can be launched by any website you visit or any app you use on a vulnerable device without requiring any explicit confirmation or consent from you.
• The attack takes less than one second to generate a fingerprint.
• The attack can generate a globally unique fingerprint for iOS devices.
• The calibration fingerprint never changes, even after a factory reset.
• The attack provides an effective means to track you as you browse across the web and move between apps on your phone.

* Following our disclosure, Apple has patched this vulnerability in iOS 12.2.

Research paper.