Steve Jobs is your Big Brother,...

About the only thing I do that's unlawful these days is drive way too fast-but it's exactly that they could use my phone to prove.
No, used to do political stuff, and might do political stuff again. Illegal tactics were used against the Civil rights movement...
I've been tackled by a cop at the end of a legal protest (an AIDS march in 1992) when I was running away...They were randomly pulling people out of the fleeing crowd and beating on them with batons, having lots of fun doing so.

And I don't trust authorities of any sort and never will. If you choose to do so, *meh.*

Oh, and no, you have to take the battery out, I believe. Off isn't totally off.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Horse shit.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

They have horse shit installed by law? Crazy.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

not horseshit. The GPS is not super accurate, nor is it exposed to the user, but it is a requirement of Phase II of the e911 regulations to allow for 911 emergency calls to work with wireless systems.

http://www.ehow.com/facts_7775262_fcc-cell-phone-gps-tracking.html
http://www.fcc.gov/pshs/services/911-services/enhanced911/archives/factsheet_requirements_012001.pdf

All handsets sold in the US after 2002 must be location aware, all systems must be able to locate a handset to within 100 meters by 2012 (due to some delays by networks, the deadlines have been pushed back a few times)


Also, due to popular demand, Apple has today updated the tracking procedure to only cache the prior 7 days worth of data on the phone itself, and deletes the cache completely if the user turns off location services. iOS update 4.3.3

edit: 100 meters/~300 feet, not 300 meters

 

They all have GPS.

Apple does upload the data back to themselves, as do Android phones.

Police departments around America are starting to scan cellphones and retrieve all the data on the phone during interactions with citizens. Various states have statutes about this. They know everywhere you've gone, who you call, etc.

But why shouldn't they do all this? People aren't intelligent to understand the problem with it.

 

That is NOT GPS. It's triangulation from the mobile network.

So I call Horseshit on the all US mobiles have GPS built in.

 

No they do not.

Simply they can be located using triangulation from the mobile phone network. This is sometimes referred to as AGPS, or assisted GPS, but it not real GPS utilising the satellite network, and is marketed rather dishonestly, as it relies on being in an area with signal.

 

True....but this would support the general hypothesis proposed in the OP.

 

Ah well thats OK. I mean its only those that have something to hide that should have a problem...

 

Er, no.

That the location of your mobile phone can be determined from cell towers and revealed to emergency services is different to your phone logging your whereabouts since you first switched it on.

 

Phase 1 is triangulation. Phase 2 has to be better than triangulation.

from this NPR report back in 2006, Verizon, Sprint, and Nextel all chose to implement the FCC e911 rules by using a GPS chip, Cigular was holding onto improving triangulation to meet phase 2. Since AT&T isn't listed, and it's now joined with Cingular, I guess it's possible that AT&T phones don't all have gps in them, but I don't have a reference one way or the other.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6097216

this page indicates that AT&T does use gps:
http://www.travelbygps.com/articles/tracking.php

edit:

AGPS uses *both* the GPS signal and triangulation; largely because triangulation comes online faster. It's not just triangulation.

edit2: reference for A-GPS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS

 

I checked the specs of a few cheap $40 Verizon handsets,... and they do not have GPS.

Oooh, that article is not quite accurate. The first smartphone I looked at was on the 'Three' 3G network here in the UK, it boasted AGPS, but it worked solely from the 3G network, it had no satellite receiver.

EDIT, also the first iPhone, released in 2007, had no GPS,... that didn't get introduced until the iPhone 3G.

 

You are confusing user-accessible GPS functionality with the presence GPS chip for exclusive use of e911.

Most non-smart phones don't have user-accessible GPS. Check the links I've been providing like the NPR report; they cover this.

Hmm, that's interesting. In the US, A-GPS exclusively means GPS with triangulation assist. Maybe this entire confusion is US vs everyone else; the non-user-accessible GPS chips in US cell phones are due to US regulation. Maybe non-US phones haven't had this pressure, and really don't have GPS chips.

edit: perhaps I shouldn't say "You are confusing", but say instead that I've not made my point clear. There is GPS as a feature of higher-end phones allowing for things like Google maps and turn-by-turn directions. That is still pretty new and not in all phones. FCC regulation in 1997 mandated that within a few years, all handsets sold in the US had to be able to located w/in 100 meters. Most, if not all cell providers did this by adding a tiny cheap GPS chip to their phones, but without adding this information to the user interface. The data was exclusively used when an emergency call was placed, sending the lat/long data to emergency services via the closest cell tower. The second cell phone I ever got, a crappy $10 candy bar phone purchased in ~2004, had one of these and was gps aware in the background, even though I couldn't do mapping or any GPS stuff with it. When I bought this phone, I asked for an analog phone, as the digital signal in the mountains was still pretty poor. However, I was told that all new handsets had to have gps, and the handsets with gps were digital only; so no analog for me.


edit2: Checking with a few people I know over at Apple, it seems you are correct about the iPhone, though. triangulation only, in 2007. Since it was on AT&T, maybe they really did postpone moving to GPS for as long as possible, iPhone included. I wonder if that played at all into the original AT&T exclusivity deal; Verizon requiring gps in the original version being an added cost Apple didn't want to pay.

 

Actually, that's not certain. If an emergency service can triangulate you on request, what's to prevent another set of receivers from doing so on a more regular basis, or a constant basis? I'm not saying that it is the case, but that it could be. The next question is whether such surreptitious large- or narrow-scale observation would be observed by neutral parties. IOW: who would notice, if anyone? And what would they say about it?

 

No I'm not. The regs specify a percentage of locations within certain distances, not that GPS must be enabled. These targets seem to be able to be met with via any method. 3G triangulation would easily meet these criteria, and indeed, around town with good signal strength, I do not enable the GPS on my phone, as triangulation is usually enough. I use it in the car for extra accuracy, but then I can use the car charger, because if the GPS is left on, battery life is very short.

I just do not believe the economics, that a $40 phone can be built with GPS. Also, if it was there, a manufacturer would at least have software to display latitude/longitude data. It's a wasted opportunity else.

Yeah, and it proves that this legislation does not _require_ GPS, but rather, that certain targets by percentage are locatable within certain distances.

 

Agreed; I was wrong that the regulations required gps. It seems that the regulations require accuracy, which I understand to be high enough that gps is required. You say that 3g triangulation is sufficient, but the requests by cellular companies to push back phase II of the rule enforcement due to their inability to meet the requirements suggests otherwise.

From that 2006 NPR report:

"There's a good chance that you are, right now, carrying around a tiny device that's picking up faint radio signals from space and keeping track of your location. It's a Global Positioning System — or GPS — receiver, built into your cell phone. A hundred million or so people in the United States have those devices, but few, up to now, have been able to use them....Before you rush to your computer to download [a free-ware GPS searching app], however, you should know that it doesn't work on most cell phones, because most cell-phone companies have locked away the information inside the phone where customers can't retrieve it."

edit: and it was a wasted opportunity for many years.

 

See, again, that I can't swallow. GPS would be a cost to the manufacturer, and a selling point for the phone. Like I said, they'd display the lat/long at the very least.

 

It seems strange that the costs of installing receivers would outweigh that of GPSing phones themselves.

 

But that's what happened. You'd be right that it would make sense to expose it, from the user's point of view.

But they were including the chip out of legal necessity, and adding a gui cost a bit more money to develop. More importantly, as also described in the article (and something I railed against at the time), cell phone providers started charging for access to that data a few years after these chips began being included in the handsets. Why just expose it when you can charge an extra $5/mo for it?

This was back in the mid 2000's, when Verizon was still trying to sell it's walled garden version of the internet V-Cast in with the same business model that AOL used int he Early 90's. And they made tons of cash on it, because people are dumb. See also the stupid amounts of money they made by locking phones from being able to transfer data over bluetooth, despite having bluetooth capability for ear pieces; they prevented users from moving ringtones to their phones themselves, then charged $3 per ringtone when downloaded over V-Cast. The dumbest, least efficient way possible to get a ringtone, but it made Verizon money.

edit:
IMO, they (minus AT&T and Cingular, it seems) added GPS due to the pending FCC regulations, but locked the access down until they figured out a way to monetize it. Once they did, they charged for access to the data until things like car GPS units and the iPhone pushed them to start granting access for free (and access to the full web instead of v-cast in Verizon's case) as is now more and more common. Anything more than displaying lat/long still requires a data connection or large local storage, both of which tend to be the realm of smart-phones, so even though most handsets have gps chips, many may still not really do much with them.

 

Despite the persistent clinging to ignorance by some of our posters, yes almost all cell phones have GPS in them.