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Man Stalks Ex-girlfriend With GPS
grouchomarxist writes "According to this article at CNN: Police arrested a man they said tracked his ex-girlfriend's whereabouts by attaching a global positioning system to her car. Police said Gabrielyan attached a cellular phone to the woman's car on August 16 with a motion switch that turned on when the car moved, transmitting a signal each minute to a satellite. Information was then sent to a Web site that allowed Gabrielyan to monitor the woman's location." A ruling last year stated that police need a warrant to track individuals in a similar fashion.
Well, this is hardly news to us on
No doubt that'll change over the next year.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
It actually sounds like a neat project, just a sketchy application. I wonder if its legal to attach one to, say, your child's car. Perhaps make the sensor a bit less sensitive, so it only broadcasts a signal after an impact-type shock.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
All this and he couldn't figure out how to hook the thing up to the car battery?
Any instructions on how to set one of these up? Sounds like the only improvement necessary was a hookup to the car battery. Duh! Also, don't phones these days have GPS or something like it built in, that locates the phone based on triangulation with cell towers? If you used that you could do away with the GPS unit altogether, and just need a motion switch to trigger a program on the phone that texts the location - or just make it transmit at intervals.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
you can get it here
Yet it is illegal for a private citizen to follow someone in public. What is with the double standard?
I doubt the GPS part would have led to a conviction in Cali standing by itself. Of course, the GPS will haelp make the case for the stalking, but wouldn't likely be illegal if that were all he had done.
Pretty scary, huh?
p.s. - Can you techies tell me how to hook one of these up?
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GPS receivers are completely passive
I'll explain that better for everyone's benefit. Since GPS was a millitary technology, it was designed to allow you to find your position without yelling "I am here" to all your enemies. Now there is a difference between GPS tracking and cell phone tracking. Cell phones constantly communicate with the towers, which can triangulate and thus find the location of the cell phone, in this case it is the towers that are more passive (you could set up three recievers and track cell phones without sending out signals).
So, that is why GPS is cool, and cell phone GPS-wannabe isn't.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
And it doesn't bother them.
I've talked with teenagers about what it means when their cell phone has GPS. They're not bothered by having their location reported. They like the idea of knowing where all their friends are. Then they'd know who's nearby, and could hook up. It's a feature.
But so I could _NOT_ run into her.
I kept running into her with my new girlfriend (obtained after the breakup with the wife). It was awkward, to say the least...
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One night while doing some shift work (6PM-6AM), one of my co-workers went home for "lunch" at 2AM. He found that his wife wasn't home and, worse, had left their 4 year old son unattended. This was the second time that had happened, so he decided to investigate. The next time we were working night shifts, he put a GPS under a blanket that happened to be in the back of their hatchback. Twelve hours later (again after his wife hadn't been home at "lunchtime") he retrieved the GPS. He followed the recorded track around, and then along with a few friends, staked out the route the next time we were on mids. One of them spotted her in a parking lot and videotaped her from a distance for the next few hours. He contacted the cops (this being an military base and overseas) and turned over the tape. The police investigated, determined she was running a prostitution ring, and had her deported back to her country of origin. My co-worker was able to both successfuly divorce her and get custody of the child.
I think the whole story says a lot about geeks.
/. would be talking about what a cool hack it is.
There is a tendancy to assume that because someone is a geek, they are a great person. I'm certainly guilty of it. The reality is that technology is neutral and skills in technology don't tell you much about a person. It may suggest a certain kind of temprament.
Under other circumstances (eg a stolen car that is found by our intrepid geek after fitting this thing to it)
meh
I was excited about the starting work at the company and went for a walk around town because I did not know what to do with myself. I ended up running into this one girl that worked at a local starbucks seven times in within a couple hours. It was really freaky and each time we would be coming from opposite directions or at cross paths at intersections. After the third or fourth time, I decided to get as far away from her and her date as I could and went to chinatown and then along the seawall on the other side of the harbour. When I got back, we ran into each other again.
She tried talking to me about it the next day and I told her "yeah that was really weird" and I ended up avoiding avoiding her as much as possible after that.
I was stalked by one of my ex-girlfriends before we had dated. She admitted it one night when she was drunk (hence the ex part). Looking back now I can see it but at the time, I thought it was just a chance meeting that happened a few days a week.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
No, the law does Not say "GPS" has to be installed in cell phones. It simply says the phones need to be able to be tracked by location. And that this location information needs to be available to emergency services (911). And despite a lot of protestations from the tinfoil hat crowd, this law will not mandate the installation of trackers into new cell phones. Why? Because all cell phones can already be tracked today.
Building GPS into phones would be silly because GPS needs to be within line of sight to the sky. A roof over your head and the GPS tracking wouldn't work at all.
There is a huge difference between GPS and cellular phone triangulation. And neither the device described in this article nor any of the "GPS Tracking" devices I've seen actually use GPS. They use cellular phone networks to triangulate your location based on the known positions of the cell phone towers. I read about some hackers doing this in 2600 magazine about a decade ago. The reason a lot of these devices are falsely called "GPS Trackers" is simply because they report locations in GPS coordinate format instead of longitude and latitude. They actually have zero to do with GPS satellites.
Anyway, the cell phone industry is not building trackers into cell phones. They don't need to. They can triangulate your position any time your phone is turned on, right now! They've always done this to a certain extent. It's how they hand off your call to the next tower.
The only difference now is that government legislation is forcing the phone companies to upgrade their main office phone equipment. Allowing export of this existing triangulation data to emergency services. Is it big brotherish? Sure, but you're kidding yourself if you think the dark and scary government agencies haven't had access to this stuff for ages.
The good part about this is that anyone suspecting they've been tagged can check for these devices with a cheap cell phone signal detector. I guess some of these devices could be very sneaky and only turn on for a short burst every minute or so. So the safest bet would be to purchase a portable cell phone jammer. Jammers are cheap and easily available on the net from non-US sources. And they should entirely disable any of theses "GPS trackers.".