Colleagues: In recent days, Google announced the beta of some software for a GPS-equipped mobile phones. See http://tinyurl.com/yrvfo3 The way it works is by picking up a signal from cell towers, it indicates the phone's location with a blue dot on Google's Mobil Maps. (For what it's worth, I have Google Mobile Maps on my Treo 650, but I have yet to get this version to work.)
Here's my question: Would it be possible for the Google mothership to do the equivalent of "pinging" my phone number, not to make a call but to see if (a) the phone is on and if so (b) where is that phone? The phone wouldn't ring, so the user would have no idea he/she is being geo-located. I assume that if Google could do that, those phone numbers and geocodes could easily become a data base appropriate for some interesting data mining, both as a static bit of insight and if done, say, every hour, whew. What a rich pile of insight for all sorts of people, businesses and survey agencies. Putting aside issues of a person's privacy, just the collective data about where that particular phone is going -- forget who owns it -- would be rather amazing and useful to some. So, back to the questions: 1) Would those pings of a phone be possible? 2) Would the results reflect location and movement of that phone down to what degree of distance today? Are we talking meters or kilometers or ???? 3) And if Google wasn't doing the pinging, could anyone who had my phone number track my location and/or distance from any originating dialing point/server? Thanks, Tom Johnson -- ========================================== J. T. Johnson Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA www.analyticjournalism.com 505.577.6482(c) 505.473.9646(h) http://www.jtjohnson.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." -- Buckminster Fuller ==========================================
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