{"id":17601,"date":"2026-11-04T09:43:17","date_gmt":"2026-11-04T16:43:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=17601"},"modified":"2026-11-03T09:53:31","modified_gmt":"2026-11-03T16:53:31","slug":"geolocating-people-by-audio-clips","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=17601","title":{"rendered":"Geolocating people by audio clips"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s long been known that people trying to remain anonymous have been betrayed by the silent hum of the electrical grid that gets unintentionally recorded in your audio and video clips. But now, there&#8217;s an even new one. You can be betrayed by planes going by &#8211; even if they are pretty much inaudible to you. The sound even travels through walls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/@colsto\">colsto<\/a> shows us how anyone can isolate the sound of planes you have inaudibly recorded in your voice or video clips can reveal your location. He uses a filter to isolate the doppler curve of planes, uses open data sources to get flight paths and flight data, then examines the doppler curves of the plane passing to reconstruct enough of the plane&#8217;s probable path near you to find matches. And it&#8217;s shockingly accurate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Even more frightening &#8211; you usually cannot even hear the planes in the recordings. Poor quality cell phone mics and data compression, running high pass and other filters usually doesn&#8217;t remove them either. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/UytYrhYLOKI?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s long been known that people trying to remain anonymous have been betrayed by the silent hum of the electrical grid that gets unintentionally recorded in your audio and video clips. But now, there&#8217;s an even new one. You can be betrayed by planes going by &#8211; even if they are pretty much inaudible to you. The sound even travels through walls. colsto shows us how anyone can isolate the sound of planes you have inaudibly recorded in your voice&#8230;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"><a class=\"btn btn-default\" href=\"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=17601\"> Read More<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">  Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cool","category-technical"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4WECr-4zT","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17601"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17602,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17601\/revisions\/17602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}