Malicious software can track your location simply by measuring the way your Android smartphone uses power even without access to location data such as GPS.

A study in the MIT Technology Review said this technique is based on the concept the amount of power a smartphone uses depends largely on the smartphone's distance from the nearest cellular base station.

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This distance changes as a user moves, increasing or decreasing the power needed to communicate with a base station. As this power usage profile strongly correlates with the movement of the phone, the location of the user can be pinpointed.

This simply means a smartphone uses more power the farther he is from a cellular base station.

To find out how this spying technique works, a team from the computer science department at Stanford University developed an Android app named PowerSpy that measures power usage.

They tested the app on a number of devices, taking 43 different power usage profiles on four different routes each about 14 kilometers long.

Researchers reported they could determine which route a user took with an accuracy of 93 per cent just by analyzing the phones' power usage profiles.

The results showed that applications that read the phone's ampere meter can gain information about the location of a mobile device without accessing the GPS or any other coarse location indicators.

These researchers noted a malicious app working similar to PowerSpy neither has permission to access the GPS nor other location providers such as a cellular or Wi-Fi network.

They said there are 179 apps currently available on Android app store Google Play that request this location information.

The Stanford team that wrote the report consisted Yan Michalevsky, Dan Boneh and Aaron Schulman along with Gabi Nakibly from Rafael Ltd.

"Our approach enables known route identification, real-time tracking, and identification of a new route by only analyzing the phone's power consumption," said Michalevsky.