Cell tower data has been used for quite a while to trace the movement of individuals and groups of individuals around a city or other geographic location. See: http://www.csiss.org/
Gus Koehler, Ph.D. President and Principal Time Structures, Inc. 1545 University Ave. Sacramento, CA 95825 916-564-8683, Fax: 916-564-7895 Cell: 916-716-1740 www.timestructures.com _____ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow Sent: Monday, December 03, 2007 8:08 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Google, GPS and "We know where you are." Well, according to this slashdot: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/23/196229 which points to this Washington Post article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/22/AR2007112201 444_pf.html the feds have been routinely asking for and getting real time cell tower tracking information from your phone provider, even though it runs counter to DoJ guidelines. So that's with access to the cell phone infrastructure but it's roughly the same information that GoogleMaps is using to locate your phone without GPS. As for bugging your phone, sure, it would be no problem to write a small program which ran on your Treo, woke up regularly, checked the cell id's on the closest towers, and SMS'ed that information to someone who was interested. You might notice the extra interference on your car FM radio if you have a GSM phone, you might notice the SMS charges on your phone bill, or you might walk around announcing your location until the phone broke. But the pings, the handshakes with the cell towers, are infrastructural, they're your phone's business and the phone company's business, and they only go further if your phone or your phone company explicitly shares them. The precision depends on the density of the towers and how well the intersecting sectors have been mapped by GPS phones. While GMaps is active on the phone, it's reading out the id's for the nearest tower/cells and the signal strength for each id. If the phone has GPS, it sends the cell id's/signal strength and the GPS location to mother google for her world map. If the phone has no GPS, it just sends the cell id's/signal strength to mother google. She checks her map and sends back an estimated location and error. That it's not working around Santa Fe probably means that there aren't many, or any, GPS enabled phones running GoogleMaps and reporting actual locations around these parts. But Google can't ping your phone, it's your phone that pings the towers to maintain its connectivity. And Google only collects the tower id/signal strength/location information, because collecting identities would be evil, not to mention hideously expensive given that there is one cell phone for every two people on earth as of last thursday: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/29/213245 -- rec -- On Dec 3, 2007 1:10 AM, Tom Johnson < [EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: 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 ========================================== ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
