Hi all,
I think that emergency personnel can find people through their cell phones if they have GPS. BUT, can this be done by anyone at all, or just by people who have specialized equipment/clearance/God knows what? I’m trying to figure out if this is even a halfway realistic plot point for my novel (one ordinary person finding another through cell phone GPS.) Thanks in advance to all the smart people! 
The e911 system can locate you even without the GPS function enabled.
If somebody gained access to my Google account they could pretty well track me thanks to Google Latitude. Latitude is an opt-in service, of course, and I had to activate GPS-based Latitude position updates on the phone.
I don’t think there’s a way to activate a smartphone’s GPS remotely, police or not. But I think they have authority to track the location based on active cell towers.
Sprint phone? Gotcha covered.
https://sprint-locator.safely.com/signIn.htm
Iphone? Find My iPhone on the App Store
GM vehicle?
My boy is in Orlando to play the Cornholers in the Capital One bowl. I just checked and he’s at Sea World. He’s going to Disney World tomorrow, and Universal Studios the next day.
I’ll be able to see what ride he’s on.
Not that I would do that. 
I do however, thank every deity that exists - or doesn’t 
that my parents never had that capability.:eek:
this. you can be found simply by cell tower triangulation. gps just adds one more method.
i’d assume for a normal person to be able to find someone they would need to jump though some hoops, or access services like Find My IPhone or Google Latitude etc. which requiring knowing the target’s password.
there’s stories like this: How Apple let a hacker remotely wipe an iPhone, iPad, MacBook | ZDNET
5 minute edit windows are fucking terrible.
better link: How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking | WIRED
I was at an AT&T press conference, around 2000, at which they announced all kinds of new things including the e911 system. I got my question in: “Doesn’t that mean cell phones become a pretty dandy tracking collar?” The other reporters took up the thread, the presentation turned to absolute chaos, at least two major articles were written stemming from the incident and AT&T has probably never taken my name off the permanent blacklist.
That’s a damn sophisticated tracking capability, that your kiddo’s cell phone can even tell you where he’ll be tomorrow and the day after!
or perhaps :eek: !
In the recently-rebooted Superman comic series, in the new Issue #1, Jimmy Olsen calls his cell phone “my personal stalker”.
The Cornholers? Is this an anal sex championship?
Bob
The leagues differ greatly in their rules based on geography. In some locales, the focus is on speed and accuracy of raw buggery. In the midwest, cornholing focuses on throwing beanbags through holes cut in a board from a distance sort of like a carnival game. Needless to say, a unified national conference has never been developed due to differences in interpretations of the rules.
To the extent that:
Anybody who can grab the signal and really wants to know what’s in it can.
Even if you string a “secure” cable and hard-wire your gear so it can connect ONLY via that cable, anyone clever enough to physically access the cable, has your info.
All this noise about “internet privacy” is a joke - anything you transmit is known to anyone who wants to know.
Get over it - privacy is dead. When you need to pass nude pat giggling morons to get on a plane, you should know the battle’s over, and decency and common courtesy lost.
The bits that get transmitted are known to anyone who wants them, yes. This is in fact one of the core assumptions that goes into the design of secure communication systems: You encrypt everything sensitive, such that if (or when) the encrypted communications are intercepted, the interceptor isn’t able to do anything with them.
Now, admittedly, it is also possible to crack encryption. But it can be made overwhelmingly hard. Overwhelmingly, as in, if every computer built on the planet from now until the day you die were to do nothing but work on the problem nonstop, they still wouldn’t crack it.
Ha HA! Let’s make homophobic jokes in GQ.
Well, it WAS just meant as a question… funny how fast it went south… Anyway.
This looks like the best possibility for a plausible plot point. I also talked to a friend who mentioned these apps. If this is going to work, then the main character’s cousin has to be able to track her down through her phone. He’s not particularly geeky, so anything involving encryption cracking is out. But if it’s a commercial available app, I think it would be believable.
And for everyone with a dirty mind…
Bullshit.
Anecdote:
I know of someone whose purse was snatched, with their phone inside. I think police used GSM triangulation to locate the non-cash contents and the phone near a river, where it was dumped. This was in China.
Please explain your thought process that brought you to this unsubstantiated assumption of my thinking or opinion of the A) Nebrask Cornhuskers and B) anal intercourse.
Wow. Well, it sounds like it’s definitely plausible to use it as a plot point, which is really all that it needs to be. I mean, this is a paranormal mystery where Satan shows up in the first ten pages… we don’t need STRICT realism here. 
Here’s two guys singing about their experience cornholing.
Got a try it before you knock it.
Sounds like an interesting read.