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Track People Using Their Mobile Phones
Richard W.M. Jones writes "A couple of new services have been rolled out in the UK recently which allow you to track people when they have their mobile phones turned on. Mapminder states 'It's important to know where your loved ones are for your own peace of mind'. 192.com asks 'Do you want to know where your children are?'. Of course the police have been able to do this for a long time, and evidence from mobile phone positions has been used in high-profile court cases in the UK. Silicon.com has an article."
Here and passive radar tracking via cell phone towers here.
"Location based services" is the technical term. Basically the GSM provider can localize a phone depending on its last known cell contact. Phones in passive mode re-register themselves automatically only every half-hour or so, so the position is not up to date unless the person is using the phone to call or send messages. There is a kind of 'ping' SMS which just causes the phone to re-register and thus return a valid position. It only works if the phone is turned on (doh!). The whole concept is seen as a great money spinner by the GSM providers, but like MMS and other new gadgets, that is more optimistic than realistic. LBS is probably going to be most useful in chat and dating, allowing over-horny people (I suspect mainly gays) to find each other simply by tapping on their phone. The "find your loved ones" is a joke, no-one actually expects to use this to find their errant husband or kids - it's for dating, boozing, and possibly the return of stolen phones (the service I would most appreciate, having had 5+ phones stolen in the last two years).
My company develops LBS SMS products. It's a fun market.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
This is all pretty well known to those watching the E911 drama unfold.
The easiest and simplest method for most carriers to comply with E911 is using triangulation. Indeed, bellsouth even posted a nice article about the various ways location can be obtained for cell phone users.
Obviously, with a GPS stuck in the phone itself this becomes really trivial, but even with normal phones you can use a variety of techniques, like Time Difference Of Arrival (TDOA) and Angle Of Arrival (AOA) and even Enhanced Observed Time Difference (EOTD) to triangulate the location of a wireless caller.
The carriers are already using this technology across the US, and many phones are now available with GPS integrated.
Welcome to the future.
I found out this when I was working over the summer. Your mobile can still be tracked even though it's switched off. The only way to ensure it is not tracked is to physically take the battery out of it. This can be proved by listening to the interference caused by the phone when it's off and near a radio/stereo for example.
Bored? http://www.dodgybloke.co.uk
The technology is not based on GPS but triangulates the position of the phone based on signal strength of masts.
Any phone can be tracked in this manner.
It would be fantastic to be able to get access to this and find out where you had been and when
:
...
Even better, combine information from all Virgin point of sales in the UK to obtain much more details
8:21 - Virgin Mobile phone turned on in Kensington
9:55 - Virgin Mobile customer applies for a Virgin credit card
10:34 - Virgin Mobile customer orders a Virgin Cola near the Virgin V2 music store in Kensington
11:03 - Virgin Mobile customer goes for Virgin Vodka instead. Cola sucks.
12:45 - Virgin Mobile customer boards Virgin train, westbound
15:45 - Virgin Mobile phone located in Heathrow Airport at the Virgin Atlantic booth
16:12 - Virgin Mobile customer steps inside a bookshop in Heathrow Airport and buys a Virgin Book
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
You are mixing 2 cases here:
1. was the sad case of Daminola Taylor, a 10 year old schoolboy, murdered. It was expcted a gang of only slightly older kids killed him, but this suspected group 'got off' because their mobile phones were traced to a distance too far away from the murder scene to be credible. The ganag was mainly Afro-Carribean (Daminola Taylor was Nigerian, the racial aspect centered around Afro-Carribean vs. African violence, a serious friction point in London's black community).
2. The infamous racist killing in SOuth London was that of Stephen Lawrence (late teens IIRC) whose alleged attackers (racist white gang) 'got off' on technical details.
Both were killings and in both cases the attacters were not convicted.
It's not GPS at all. RTFA.
It's triangulation and position reporting based on the last cell that your phone was in. That's all. And the networks have been doing it for years as a side-effect of normal network activity. If the system didn't know where phones were in the country, how would they route calls to the correct base station?
Jeez, it's not hard, people...
Track your children.
Some of these services come in Denmark as well. Today we already use some tracking systems to track children, preventing them from becoming lost. The below article describe a blue tooth system installed in Aalborg Zoo here in Denmark.
http://in.tech.yahoo.com/030620/137/25bu3.html
The system is in principle (but not technically) the same as triangulation of a cell phone to track your child between school and home. The main issue arises if tracking is allowed without the cell phone owners consent.
By the way; if I was a kid who didn't want mom and dad to know where I was, I would borrow my phone to someone else, or just turn it of. Kids are not stupid...
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com
...a friend's kid got snatched. They closed the mall and found the guy- in less than five minutes he'd changed the kid's clothes and dyed his hair
Really? I'm sure snopes would like names and dates for this event.
...which is why reporters on Air Force One were required to remove the batteries from their cell phones on the President's Thanksgiving Day trip to Iraq.
They know how to control it for themselves -- why should they care about the privacy of individuals when there are $$$ to be made?
All I have to say is Yes Yes and Yes. Not satisfied with my service through them either, but a contract is a contract....
This is why I don't and never will own a mobile phone, I've been seeing this coming for years. Hint: if you ever feel the need to join a public protest, leave your phone elsewhere.
That's why, in fact, prove is in quotes.
This is utter nonsense, because cellphones keep a running log of all of the cells in transmission range, up to the maximum trackable by the telephone, and remain connected to all of them. This is the only way that it's possible to do a smooth handover from cell to cell.
In built up areas like city blocks, the providers use what are known as 'micro-cells' that are attached to the side of buildings or on lamp posts because a simple tower is not enough to reach all of the blind spots created by buildings.
In Auckland City, which is not exactly the most cosmopolitan of cities, there are over two hundred cell sites, and my old Nokia 5110 GSM phone would be connected to no less than six of them at any time. This would be easily enough information to track not only my latitude and longitude, but also my altitude down to less than one meter.
In the old days, that was true. Now there are infrastructure-based technologies that are being deployed that can accurately measure your location within about 100 yards. These systems usually use either the phase angle of arrival or the time difference of arrival method to determine your location and don't require a GPS in the phone. Your phone simply has to be turned on. GPS systems require a special phone and an unimpeded view of enough GPS satelites in order to function.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
And I can state unequivocably that the statement that:
'Well, there were lots of tourists there, and all had cell phones.'
Is untrue.
Having had a cell phone in 1993, I can say that less than 5% of the population had cell phones at that time. Even among my tech geek friends, only one or two others had them. Amongst the general population the penetration was far lower.
Handheld cell phones were still rather large and a battery that would last all day was about half a pound. And this was on the newest phone at the time, the Motorola Star Tac Ultra Lite, which was the first phone with a vibrating ringer and the first with NiMH batteries. I paid $800 for mine at the time. A contract was about $50 a month with no included minutes and minutes were $0.45 a piece ($0.20 at night).
They simply didn't make financial sense for most people.
I would furthermore hazard a guess that that particular rural location didn't have cell phone coverage in 1993.
And since I'm being pedantic, it's "motorcyclist".
As far as I'm aware, they all still require multiple nearby base stations. Typically, there's not much directional about the comms at those stations; it would be unreliable anyway, given the nature of mobile phone signals. Hence you still need to triangulate, or use some variation on the theme. The question is more the accuracy with which you can do it.
IOWs, these services work much better in some places than others. Not a great surprise, given the nature of mobile phones, but worth pointing out, particularly if they're being advertised as a way to track missing things.
They also need the mobile to be switched on, of course. Again, pretty obvious, but a fairly significant drawback if it were claimed to be useful in cases of abduction.
(Incidentally, to the AC grandparent: at least on the major networks I've had experience with, the system hasn't automatically triangulated in the past. The switch to a new base station is indicated simply by the relative signal strengths on some sort of control channel; when the signal from your current station gets too weak, you switch to a more viable alternative if there's one available.)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.