Barry Wellman raised this in the mobile society group earlier this year vis: http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2007/05/cellphone_forensics there are some interesting issues here such as - the prevalence of calls being made by others on one's mobile - esp. for some social groups - the fact that it is the device not the person that is being tracked... Younger siblings swap/share cell phones. - the awareness of traceability and the response = to switch phones off /leave them on but at home/or give them to someone else beforehand - the perfect alibi You don't need GPS - many phones can triangulate themselves using the transmitters they can 'see' and google are now offering a beta location service based on this. http://www.google.co.uk/gmm/mylocation.html?hl=en_GB Ben On 19 Dec 2007, at 17:54, Charlie Balch wrote:
I've been reading some recent buzz in the popular press about the implications of GPS enabled cell phones.
Modern phones allow for some fascinating possibilities. The location of a cell phone can be accurately and historically tracked with the possibility of notification to other parties of excess speed or passing boundaries. For instance, I'm not sure how the court case ended but there was a recent conflict over traffic radar and the more accurate cell phone GPS speed tracking. I'm sure the possibility of tracking persons of interest is not lost on law officials and know that such options are marketed to parents.
By the way, http://www.bitpim.org/ is cool cell phone software that I don't think has anything to do with your location.
Charles Balch Professor of Computer Information Systems Arizona Western College
---- Dr Ben Anderson Director Technology and Social Change Research Centre University of Essex +44 (0) 7710 187 806 http://chimeraweb.essex.ac.uk/tasc