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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."
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
Obviously, this is good if you have a cell phone and are being tried for a crime that you did not commit, it's just a simple matter of proving where you were at XX:XX:XX on XXX the XX of XXXXXXXX. However, if someone steals your phone, then plants it on a perpetrator, then sneakily gives it back, you've got some explaining to do.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
This way my mother can find out I'm at a strib club, and won't ask me any inconvenient and embarrising questions when I get home because she will be too embarrised.
Beep beep.
You can turn GPS off, but it still works for 911?
If it works for 911, why couldn't it work for the government?
Sounds to me like it just turns the GPS off for most people..
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.
:
...
Such a service has existed for a long time. It's
Mom: [dialing little James] Jimmy, where are you?
Little James: [Stepping out of the arcade] I'm at the school library
Of course, the accuracy of the information wasn't always guaranteed
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Here and passive radar tracking via cell phone towers here.
No, I'm not a deviant, I'm just making a point.
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.
"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.
This does not track people.
It tracks their cell phones. Those things are not necessarily in the same place.
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
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...
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.
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.
With a mobile phone, if your government ever suspects that you are a dissident, not only can they pull up a complete travel log for your life since you got the phone, but they can also check who you have been talking to, and the movements of those people too.
We must value our rights, such as privacy, before we accept technology. Electronic voting was the latest disaster. E-books will be the next.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
With the reception that my AT&T mmode phone has, tracking me by that thing is not going to be easy. I know that in DC my phone dies in the lobby of many buildings and is pretty spotty in many areas (subways, basements, parks). And even if the system does manage to get a signal, the accuracy of the system still leaves much to be desired if you are in a dense metropolitan area.
Nuclear war would really set back cable. - Ted Turner
This is great news for all those people out there being stalked by their ex's who happen to be in law enforcement! Now the bastard can always know where you are! Too bad about them tracing that cell phone to your safe house...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
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.
Which mall? When? Which police department handled the case?
Just curious, because this has the ring of one of the older urban legends, so if you have a hard cite for when and where it happened, I'd be truly grateful (and might be able to win some money placing bets in the office too).
Cthulhu Barata Nikto
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
I'm tired of theses "this can save lives" arguments. Fascism "can save lives", too, but most people seem to agree that it just isn't worth it. Well, actually, they agree in the abstract, at least, but each individual step towards it gets justified with your kind of argument.
I think being able to track one's own location via GPS or cell phones is really swell. But when the police or employers can do it as a matter of course, then it fundamentally changes the kind of society we have.
...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?
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.
RTFC(omment) to which I was replying. The superparent of my original post: "at least here in the US, you CAN turn off GPS+ on your phone... even though it still works for 911..". This discussion thread isn't directly about the article in question.
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
All I have to say is Yes Yes and Yes. Not satisfied with my service through them either, but a contract is a contract....
What about police officer cell phones? If im trying to rob a bank, can I use this to tell when the cops are coming?
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
I have also stopped at numerous accidents (I'm a doc) in rural vermont and norther NY on trips, and had no clue where I am, talking to a state trooper who was 100mi away at the time (who also didn't know any of the landmarks I was near) and having the phone Co be able to locate me would have made it much easier...
As for carrying a GPS, why should I spend $100+ to be a good samaritan (I already carry emergency medical supplies that I paid for...).
IMHO as long as the phone co only gives this info to either itself for billing/service or to the 911 folks, except under warrant, then I'm all for it. I worry about the "kid tracking" services, as the security of whatever web technology they use to serve the info to the parents, is undoubtably crackable (everything is eventually), which means that someone else could track my kids... No thanks!
It's important to know where your loved ones are for your own peace of mind
Pity the poor humans who didn't have this technology available. The more I think about it, the more I wonder how we ever survived, not knowing where a "loved one" was at any moment. I'm of the opinion that people who would use such a service are obsessive, and probably need help.
Include the feature, allow it to be disabled... by default.
If you want to be tracked, it's a feature. If you don't, you're not having your privacy violated.
Of course... the main issue is with whether or not you can tell if it's actually disabled. And of course police monitoring warrants apply regardless (same as they do with a home phone wiretap, I would assume?).
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.
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."
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.