Every move you make, I’ll be watching you: Privacy implications of the Apple U1 chip and ultra-wideband

I co-authored a blog post at freedom-to-tinker with Yan Shvartzshnaider (NYU Fellow) about the potential for detailed indoors location tracking using UWB technology that is included in new Apple iPhones and Cisco APs.

Abstract: The alarming trend of tracking of user’s location through their mobile phones has very serious privacy implications. For many of us, phones have become an integral part of our daily routine. We don’t leave our homes without and take them everywhere we go. It has become alarmingly easy for services and apps to collect our location and send them to third-parties while the user is unaware. Location tracking generally works poorly indoors. Tracking services can infer your general location up to a building using current technologies like GPS, WiFi, cellular triangulation. However, your movements inside can’t be precisely tracked. However, this level of obfuscation is about to disappear as a new radio technology called ultra-wideband communications (UWB) becomes mainstream.

In its recent iPhone launch, Apple introduced the U1 ultra-wideband chip in the iPhone 11. Ultra-wideband communications use channels that have a bandwidth of 500Mhz or more, with transmissions at a low power. In this blog post, we would like to give a brief introduction into the technology behind the chip, how it operates and discuss some of its promises as well as implications for our day-to-day activities.