On Mon, July 18, 2005 12:15 pm, Thomas said:
I was wondering if anybody has attempted to track a mobile phone through a
country. I know that this is usually more a case for the FBI . a friend of
mine is going on a 4 month bike tour and I would like to 'track' him for
locations. I thought of an sms receiving system, but if could do any other
way would be great.
Having just a few months ago spent a great deal of time finding a cell
phone that would just tell me my own long/lat where I was, without the
for-fee fancy directions or my non-existent boss tracking me features, I
ran into a fair amount of info in this topic, mostly by accident.
I also wanted an SSH client so I could do emergency surgery on websites if
needed.
You'd be AMAZED how hard it is to get a cell phone company to tell you if
it has these two features or not and on which models it actually worked...
[I got the Nextel + Blackberry 7250 and it has them. YMMV]
There are at least two distinct systems in different cell phones:
1. Cell Tower location
2. GPS location
I'm not sure #1 can use multiple signals and triangulate or not. Even so,
it ain't gonna be real reliable in the case that you want to know EXACTLY
where somebody's cell phone is in case of an emergency...
#2 works better the more GPS satellites it can find.
I've seen results with 5 satellites and an error margin of 3 meters, as I
recall. (Maybe that was 4 satellites? Definitely 3 meters, though)
Some phones have both #1 and #2 and use #1 as fall-back.
US Cell Phone companies were required by law to have 911 calls provide
caller location by [some past date] to 911 operators.
Every one of these companies filed for, and received, an extension of that
deadline.
All the filings had different extended deadlines, as they all filed the
paperwork at varying times with varying reasons why they were not going to
make deadline.
So, in short, nobody knows when they'll actually get the damn things to
work right for 911.
The idea that you could arbitrarily track your friend's phone is, at best,
a Privacy Nightmare...
But let's assume your friend somehow can sign off or provide consent for
you to receive the data you desire, or wants to take some action every day
to tell you where they are, or even wants to program their phone to do it
automatically...
If he/she/it has a fancy enough cell phone with working GPS and/or Tower
location system, and if that phone allows the installation of new
applications, then, in theory, there could be an application out there
that would automatically surf to some URL to report their location.
Otherwise, you can just give them a form on a website to surf to and let
them tell you where they are, or maybe they could use their cell phone as
a PHONE and call you to tell you where they are or... Well, you get the
picture.
I don't think anybody has written that automated location notifier
application yet, EXCEPT the guys who will charge your $40 a month to track
your employees' cell phones, which allegedly *IS* an available service for
some cell phones with some providers...
Though I believe I heard at least one person state that this was still in
the vaporware stage of development as far as the end user is concerned --
That there were still some bugs to work out and while they were close to
having it work reliably, it wasn't working yet.
If you did write such an application it would probably be in Java or Palm
OS or ... Well, it almost for sure will *NOT* be in PHP, since, as far as
I know, PHP is not installed on any commercially sold phones. Though I
think there was a Linux-based Palm-like device that might maybe have had
PHP working on it...
This was all the state of things several months ago, far as I could tell,
and I'm probably already horribly out of date.
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