Authors: Hannes Spichiger

DFRWS EU 2023

Abstract

There is growing awareness that localisation traces recovered from a mobile device should not be presented as fact. Services providing locations to smartphones are influenced by a multitude of potential error sources which may cause differing observations from where the device was at. This work provides an approach to evaluate a single localisation recovered from mobile devices and present a differentiated result to decision makers. An open source implementation is provided, allowing practitioners to evaluate based on reference data they created for their own case. The effectiveness and forensic value of this method are demonstrated using a simulated scenario illustrating the use of the approach. This study demonstrates the method using locations associated to images, and is generalised to any technology providing location to any type of mobile device.

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