GPS Meets PCS

The Donald writes: "According to an article at News.com, Sprint PCS will be starting to implement E911 calls in Rhode Island sometime in October. The FCC required that all cell phone providers have an improved E911 system in place by October first. This is the first step in making the E911 a reality, with Sprint being the first major company to actually put a phone on the market that will work with E911; instead of just filing papers with the FCC saying the implementation is just to hard. The Samsung N300 phone will use GPS to track the people down. I like the idea, I just hope the phone will display the GPS information, and there is a way to opt-out for all of the location based advertisements you will get with your GPS enabled phone."

Comments

GPS location

[RedOregon]

How about enabling a switch to disable GPS except during 911 calls?

Ads???

[swordgeek]

"So, um...like...second post d00dz!!!"

OK, now that I've got that out of the way (and probably pushed myself to 10th post as a result) here's a real comment.

Ads. Ads on the phone that *I* pay for. Quite simply, there won't be any. If any company tries to advertise themselves on my phone for which I pay per-minute charges, they'll find themselves on the ugly end of a lawsuit involving the "junk fax" law and some very bloodthirsty lawyers.

If you want to advertise to my phone, then someone else will be paying my damned monthly charges. Otherwise, beware.

As an aside, I've been around long enough to see that advertisers have pushed the boundaries far enough that the pushing back we see now is an inevitable result of what's been going on for the last two decades. The end result is that we're not going to stand for much in the way of blatant advertising in anything we buy, do, or watch. All that means is that the advertisers will become sneakier.

Not quite the first..

[PenguinX]

Disclaimer: I work for TeleCommunication Systems Inc. - we provide nationwide E-911 service.

During the FCC mandate for Phase I - which most carriers still have not fully deployed was based on cellsite/sector / some other general location. For Phase II E-911 the requirement is a PDE. As there are literally hundreds of ways to get this information (GPS handsets are only one). Under the TCS solution for Phase II we query a "pluggable" PDE for the location information - so the only time that anyone gets your specific location information is only when it is needed (as in during a 911 call). The only real difference with the Sprint solution is that they have brought the PDE functionality in-house.

Just to try to help clarify...

Another big brother checking in.

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for SignalSoft Corp (http://www.signalsoftcorp.com) on their Wireless 911 product (http://www.signalsoftcorp.com/products/911/911.ht ml). Some of my cow-orkers used to laugh at me when I constantly refered to the place as "BigBrotherSoft." They stopped laughing a while ago, when we acquired a company called BFound, which does location tracking of trucks by cell phone-like equipment. And just if you want a taste of the future, go visit the mobilePosition AB website (http://www.mobileposition.com), which was also recently acquired by SignalSoft. Ever wanted to know where your friend was? Well, sooner or later it will probably happen.

I see good and bad in all this. The good is that the E911 service is probably very useful. And in benign applications, cell phone tracking is not necessarily terrible. The bad is that I'm pretty sure that sooner or later, this technology WILL be abused. We attempt to build safeguards into our software to prevent abuse (http://www.signalsoftcorp.com/newsroom/pressrelea ses/q2_2001/press_sgsfam.html) but the fact of the matter is, PDEs (cell phone location tracking systems) exist and they are out there and working right now. Some of them work by calculating the angle that your cell phone signal arrives at multiple towers, some work off the time it takes your cell phone signal to propogate to multiple towers, some work off GPS, but all of them can geolocate you to some extent or another. And those PDEs can be tapped before our software even gets its hands on the location data. Our safeguards will do nothing to stop a cell phone company from tracking you. They will only prevent our software from doing so.

So, here's the scoop. If you are worried that you are worth tracking by powerful government agencies or very, very rich people, do one of two things: A) don't carry a cell phone or, B) take the battery out of your cell phone. B) is not foolproof, but it should be good enough until cell phone manufacturers are required by law to include a small backup battery in the guts of a cell phone large enough to run a GPS receiver. Fortunatly, current batteries are very bulky and expensive, and including a nonremovable secondary one in cell phones big enough to run a GPS receiver is likely to be many years in coming.

Second, push for privacy legislation. I don't know the laws governing cell phone tracking, but I bet they're a lot laxer than they should be. A court order (like a search warrant) should be necessary for any government agency to track the cell phone of any US citizen. If this is currently the case, great. If not... let's get a bill like this passed post-haste.

-Anonymous Coward who doesn't want to lose his job right now.