For Fox News, this article is pretty in-depth and factual. It makes me wonder if this isn't a press release in the guise of a news article.<p>>In the end, technology is agnostic, Enderle said, and a company that makes a new technology is rarely liable for how it is used.<p>I've never heard Fox News make this much sense. That being said, the technology does work, but is no more advanced than AGPS that we've had for years. I had a Motorola Q that had "GPS" in that it used cell towers to triangulate your location. There was even a web service I remember using (but can't remember the name) that would pay you money to drive around with AGPS running so it could find all the towers around you and better its location services.
This is pretty straightforward, the local carrier I'm with (Vodacom SA) has been offering it for years under the 'Look4Me' brand-name.<p>Essentially it relies not on the phone itself but on the carrier's network infrastructure. In terms of GSM, with which I am more familiar than CDMA, a mobile phone 'registers' with any GSM tower and passes along certain parameters. Using that information, the carrier can combined the input from one or more towers to triangulate the location of the phone.<p>The process is opt-in and used via control codes. For instance typing in <i>120</i>888*phone number# sends a request for the location of that number. If they have not agreed to be tracked, they are sent an SMS showing them the phone number of whoever sent the request and asking them if they want to be tracked. If they ignore the SMS, nothing further happens.<p>However, tower triangulation is inherently inaccurate and in general accuracies are only within about 100 m at best and valid for the past 10 minutes. It's definitely nothing close to the kind of accuracy that solutions which use GPS, such as Apple's Find My Phone, can give you.
Obviously the biggest abuse would be someone "borrowing" your phone and opting you in without your knowledge. That's actually more frightening than losing your phone because you would never know, and it adds another incentive to locking your phone. Like other "agnostic" technological advances that can be used for good or evil, I think it would be misguided and useless to fight this technology, but I hope equal advances are made to prevent unwitting "opt-ins".
Can someone explain this to me? It nailed me, and i'm roaming far from home.<p>I'm rusty on my phone tracking technology... they send the phone an SMS, is that the mechanism? (e.g., premium sms processing gatway has geo?) Or do they tap into a telco celltower lookup?<p>I can think of a couple fun commercial applications.