
Website Can Find Your Exact Location With Your Phone Number - narad
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/02/05/website-can-find-with-your-phone-number/
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freehunter
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.

>In the end, technology is agnostic, Enderle said, and a company that makes a
new technology is rarely liable for how it is used.

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.

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viraptor
These days people do the same (GSM bases / wifi tracking) for free (see
wigle.net)

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_djo_
This is pretty straightforward, the local carrier I'm with (Vodacom SA) has
been offering it for years under the 'Look4Me' brand-name.

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.

The process is opt-in and used via control codes. For instance typing in _120_
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.

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.

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joshuahedlund
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".

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nobody_nowhere
Can someone explain this to me? It nailed me, and i'm roaming far from home.

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?

I can think of a couple fun commercial applications.

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freehunter
I don't know all the details of it, but it doesn't use your phone for anything
but a place to bounce the signal. It pings your phone, then measures the time
it takes to receive a signal from the towers nearest to it (at least two,
preferably three or more). This is all done on the end of the carrier. The
text they send you just verifies this is the phone they are looking for and
gains your permission.

