GA Tech Students Use Cell Phone Pings To Find Missing Person (ajc.com)

McGruber writes: Georgia Authorities are giving kudos to technology – and the perseverance of Georgia Tech students – for the safe return of a fellow student who disappeared after a Friday night party. The missing student was found Monday morning along railroad tracks, in northeast Atlanta. He had been beaten, was unconscious and was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital. Georgia Tech Police Chief Robert Connolly said "The students rallied together and then they started searching. The students stayed out until midnight last night, putting out pamphlets and combing the area, anywhere they could possibly find [cell phone] pings along the route." The students "were not going to stop. They checked every hospital, every hotel, they checked everywhere. They didn't give up on their friend."

Comments

SAR

[Citizen of Earth]

Search And Rescue teams should carry "Stingray" mobile cell towers with them to locate missing persons in the wilderness. Any phone in range would try to connect with them.

what is a "cell phone ping"?

[YesIAmAScript]

And how does it reveal your location?

Does this mean some kind of peer-to-peer WiFi or Bluetooth? I don't understand.

If it's cellular, then the phone is either reachable or it isn't, that doesn't change based upon how near you are to the other phone.

Are they saying they just used a built-in location service to find it?

Re:what is a "cell phone ping"?

[lakeland]

Pinging a cellphone means setting up a portable cellphone tower. All cellphones within range will report their existence to you, which you can then cross reference against your missing person's IMEI number...Through triangulation/multiple different towers you can work out the location quite accurately.

Of course this is not generally available to the public. For a start you need to have a portable tower (or borrow a few from a local telco) and secondly you'll need to cross-reference his phone number to look up his IMEI.

I'm curious how a bunch of students were able to get past the two restrictions - I can imagine a uni having some portable towers lying around for research purposes, but how would they have found out his IMEI number?

Method?

[manu0601]

How do you ping a phone? Was it through some app, or at the network layer?

Hmmm

[John Jorsett]

There's some significant holes in this story. According to the ajc.com article, he had last been seen 11pm Friday. Friends started looking for him "last night," presumably Sunday based on the article's date of Monday, Oct 19. That means he would have been lying unconscious for up to two days, yet later in the article we read, 'Atlanta police Lt. Charles Hampton described Hubert’s injuries as minor, adding that he was “not sure where those injuries came from.”' Also, what are these pings they're talking about? Pings like when the cops have the phone company tell them which towers his phone is hitting? Were the cops relaying that info to student searchers instead of searching themselves? It sounds like something else: "The students stayed out until midnight last night, putting out pamphlets and combing the area, anywhere they could possibly find [cell phone] pings along the route.” How do civilian student searchers "find pings"? I wish journalism wasn't such a realm of technical illiterates.

Re:Authorities, what good are they?

[Obfuscant]

To initiate a wide-spread search takes a lot of people -- more people than you want to have on your payroll all the time just in case they are needed.

And initiating a full-scale search for a person who is of-age and not known to be in danger would create a lot of full-scale searches for people who just didn't want to be where they were. We had the owner of a local hot-dog shop just not show up for work one day around here. He was found a few hundred miles away just trying to not be involved with the hot-dog shop anymore. The owner of a car audio store did the same thing about a month prior.

That's why missing person reports don't automatically trigger an all-out search. Not for a college student who just didn't come home. Now, one that is kidnapped from the street, or a dementia patient, or someone who is reported missing in a wilderness area, yes. But a college student who could have easily decided to shack up with someone for the weekend? If you burn out your search volunteers looking for people who just didn't want to be where they were anymore, you'll not have them available when there is someone who really does need to be found.