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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."
This is nice.. especially for kids. I wouldn't mind having it on a cell phone my kids keep in the car. Obviously there are going to be people who are going to abuse the system... but then these people probably already can... so.... Also, I'm not really worried, because... who wants to track me? I'm joe normal... but yes I know the whole invasion of privacy thing... but, at least here in the US, you CAN turn off GPS+ on your phone... even though it still works for 911..
if you're going to whack someone, first hide your phone in a restaurant a couple miles away....then you can "prove" you weren't at the crime scene.
unless they lend the phone to someone else. So much for knowing where your children are.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Back around 1999 & 2000 there were rumours/news stories about the possibility of being tracked by mobile phones, and much discussion about how it wasn't really technically possible. Phone companies denied it could be done, many law enforcement agencies denied they used it (although some were forthcoming enough to say more). The general consensus was that it was something out of the XFiles.
Now it's commercial a scant 3 years later. Who'd have guessed.
RST
Of users location since they started in 1998. It would be fantastic to be able to get access to this and find out where you had been and when - bet it would make a pretty map.
Beep beep.
That was about 10 years ago, but certainly shows how cell-phone signal triangulation can save lives.
If you don't, including for police and other emergency services, you've still got an opt-out: Take out the battery. This is not as permanent as leaving it at home, and gives you privacy. But be sure to be someplace you don't mind having listed as your last known location first.
Me, i'm pretty comfortable having my location known, and feel oke about this being part of the cellphone i'm shopping for lately. i've seen too many people go missing in Boston to really like the idea of being vanished from the map. I always swore that the child-leashes in malls were a bad idea, too, until 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 (which was still wet with the dye.) Now i'm not so sure i don't like the leashes, you know?
sol
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
As if we'd want to trust them with our data. Last time I gave them mine, it "mysteriously" got into the hands of spammers. "Mysterious", because I gave them an e-mail address specific to them, in case they should attempt something like this. Easily tracked, easily disposed of. Oh well...
This is how the feds finally caught kevin mitnick. He was hacking into the phone system using a cellular modem. They triangulated his frequency and caught him in his van.
Just to brag, I (and one other guy) wrote the client side software of the maps at MapMinder. The company who wrote the whole thing is Telmap, which was founded by me and a highschool friend of mine :-) Took me about 2 months to get the maps to look as great as they do.
There have actually been a number of mall abductions in various places, just very few in which the child was recovered. Nobody saw him get grabbed; it wasn't on camera. One moment he was right behind her, and the next she couldn't find him. She went to the register and it was their idea to call security, who immediately locked the doors and let everyone without a kid out. I don't remember whether she ended up in court or not, but there should be a police record, because it DID get that far.
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
With the narrow channel bandwidths, TDOA is not going to work very well. But if you can get the phone to simultaneously transmit on 2 widely separated frequencies (maybe 1 on each end of the allocated spectrum), you could probably get it narrowed down to 10 meters if they are wide enough apart. AOA will do much better, despite being fuzzy at long distances, for routine tracking, but not to 10 meters.
I think I need to get a tin foil hat for my cell phone.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
We've had this service with AT&T Wireless GSM/GPRS service available for customers for over a year and a half.
If the bill is passed, Finland would become one of the first European countries to allow individuals to track others without their consent and could serve as an EU benchmark."
There is even a diagram showing how the system works.
Welcum 2 the MATRIX!
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important." -BRussell
From cnn.com's timeline of Bush's Thanksgiving jaunt to Baghdad:
"During the flight from Texas to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, where they will change planes, White House deputy chief of staff Joseph Hagin asks the journalists to remove the batteries from their cell phones so their movement cannot be tracked, and asks them not to turn on their cell phones when they arrive at Andrews. He tells them they will receive new cell phones when they reach Baghdad. Other journalists join the group at Andrews AFB, where they undergo a security sweep. They are told to put all of their cell phones, pagers and other small electronic devices into manila envelopes. Their bags, cameras and other equipment will be held in the belly of the plane until the flight took off."