Your Cell Phone Is Tracking You
Satellite tracking isn’t new… we’ve had G-P-S around for years. But you may be surprised at what they’re starting to do with the technology now. For one, you may be being tracked without your knowledge…. and no satellites are involved at all!
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3 Responses to “Your Cell Phone Is Tracking You”
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Tod Elsewhere
I was surprised to find out about this ability of cell phone service providers to track the location of phones they serve when I was looking into emergency locators for a relative who has medical problems. I was looking for something he could keep on his person, and if an emergency came up when he was walking or driving, he could press a button and expect to have emergency services arrive to rescue him even if he couldn’t talk due to a medical emergency happening to him at that moment.
It turned out that “enhanced 911″ exists, and, so they say, you dial 911 from any cell phone in an emergency and even if you can’t communicate in any other way, emergency services arrive. Emergency services use this ability of cell phone providers to know where their phones are to provide this service. I’m not sure whether this service is ready for prime time or not, and I would be interested in any comments if it is proving to be as useful as it sounds.
In any case, it looks like this service which exploits the tracking ability of cell phones will be seen as essential one day.
Privacy concerns on cell phone location technology will have to be dealt with by legislation or by court interpretation of existing law - the cell phone providers do have legitimate reason to want to know where the phones they serve are, for instance, when they sell you Canadian network coverage, they want to know when you cross the US border so they can cut you off.
Most odd!
Here in the UK it’s been available for a few years:
http://www.followus.co.uk/index.html
The last company I worked for ( with a large Sales staff ) were looking into tracking all company mobile phones.
There are now lots of ways to track GPS enabled cell phones via Google Maps. You just need a data plan, and a phone that supports Java applications. It’s pretty easy to set up, and turn off if you don’t want to be tracked anymore. This site below lets you test the tracking capabilities… just SMS yourself a link to the Java app, and set it up as per directions… you can see breadcrumbs of yourself on the way to work!
http://www.gpsphonetracking.org