UCSD Students Tracking Their Friends' Locations

An Anonymous Coward writes: "The location-tracking software, developed by a 15-year-old student at the university, draws upon triangulation technology. The PDAs figure out their locations by comparing the strength levels of signals traveling from the devices to various Wi-Fi antennas. No GPS Required. Article from Salon here..."

Comments

This is not *exacty* new.

[His name cannot be s]

There is a company Cell-loc that has been working on this same sort of thing, wireless location technology, without GPS.

I can certainly see that this sort of thing is going to get big, and a large number of companies are going to want it bad.

It's kinda neat stuff, and it nicely fits where GPS doesn't: Downtown. GPS requires line-of-site to the satelites, and without that you get no position. When you are downtown, amongst big buidlings, you can't find anything.

Asset tracking is going to be big too. Help! I lost my car/pet/wife/computer!

BUUUUUT!

I just can't see how that information is going to be private, I mean when the cops can simply get a warrent for the information, bam! instant confirmation of location. Privacy Agreement or not.

This has been around for years... Even for wavelan

[DeathB]

Carnegie Mellon University has had a wireless network for years now. A few years ago all of the academic buildings had full coverage, and in the past year this has been extended to dorms and most outdoor areas.

The computer science department at CMU as well as the Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have been putting out papers on actual implementations of campus location systems. Most deal with its use for contextual/location aware computing (one of the more recent papers). Although some have dealt with the privacy implications (I should know, I was an author of one published at IEEE Wireless 2001). Project Aura deals with quite a bit of reasearch around what can be done positivly with this technology as well.

As one last thing, I wrote software to poll wavepoints and figure out a location over 1.5 years ago... It was less than 50 lines of C, so I have trouble being impressed by this.

ATTWS offers the same thing

[Vegeta99]

Launching VERY soon, a new mMode service will allow you to locate your friends using the GSM e911 service (Enhanced Observed Time Difference). You can be "invisible", but thats I'll I know about it. TDMA customers are out of luck.