Junior Member
Registered: 01-12-09 | |
Senior Member
Registered: 11-29-07 | You can be tracked to within several hundred feet via a cell phone that does not have GPS. You can be located to under 50 feet with a cell phone that has GPS. |
Junior Member
Registered: 01-12-09 | Can anyone provide the specific mechanism behind which such tracking could be accomplished on a non-GPS enabled cell phone? |
Senior Member
Registered: 10-05-08 | Cell phone towers are placed realtively close together and are very low power. The cell system contantly is "pinging" you phone periodically to determine which tower(s) to use to contact you in the event that you receive a call. Every tower that "hears" your phone logs that info with the signal strength.
If someone (police, etc) wanted to find our your location over a period of time, they can look at these ping logs and get a pretty good idea about your location and travels. IN the city (where there are many towers) they can usually determine location within a hundred yards or so. In the country areas they won't be as close, but via a history of pings they can closely determine your path. |
Senior Member
Registered: 03-11-08 | Depending on where you are, this method can be accurate to within anywhere between several to a few hundred meters.
There is an iPhone app that triangulates your approximate position and plots it on a map. The accuracy in a highly populated and modern suburban area (Duluth, GA, in my case) is typically around 50-100 meters.
Definitely possible, but police would probably need a warrant to access this information. |
Senior Member
Registered: 10-04-08 | I can't make this stuff up...
A local Government office was collecting, I assume new, donated phones for sending over seas so our troops could call home for Christmas.
They were all stolen from the warehouse at the office they were going to be sent from .
My first thought when I heard this story was : Any sap that buys one of those hot phones is going to have the wrath of the military coming down on them in no time flat.
I have not heard an update on the story yet, either they found the guy and never bothered a follow up story , or some fool is sitting on a pile of phones he can never sell.
If some bozo on the street around the NYC metro comes up to you hocking cheap phones , RUN run far away fast. |
Senior Member
Registered: 02-03-08 | it's not quite "as seen on TV" however - we tried to locate an off-road motorcycle accident by triangulating the cell phone - and the coordinates the phone company gave us led us right to the cell phone tower he was connecting through. (fortunately, we looked on the map before we actually sent an apparatus to the wrong area) |
Junior Member
Registered: 01-09-09 | About a yeargo a driver almost ran us and another car off the road... we called 911 to report it and the operator on the phone actually new what road we were on and the name of the intersection we just went through... |
Junior Member
Registered: 01-12-09 | They knew the road and intersection... that must have been a GPS-enabled cell phone you were using. I don't think existing technology could do that by pinging your phone from the towers. However, I have no doubt that the government may use technology that isn't necessarily released to the public or corporations yet that might be able to do that. |
Senior Member
Registered: 01-08-07 | quote: However, I have no doubt that the government may use technology that isn't necessarily released to the public or corporations yet that might be able to do that.
Yep, they have operatives on the inside of Motorola and Samsung as we speak slipping bugs into every phone sold on the market.  |
Junior Member
Registered: 12-25-08 | Anything that transmits can be tracked!!!
The hard part is knowing the frequency . If you know someone is talking at a given time you can scan and find them.
In WWII the Germans did that and sank a lot of ships. |
