Tag: gps cell phone tracking software

How To Download Cell Phone Tracking Software

If you are thinking about putting cell phone tracking software on your phone you might have several questions before you get started. Probably the very first thing you want to know is which program you should download. There are several great places to find some lists of tracking apps. We recommend this one: Free GPS Cell Phone Tracking

If you follow the link you will find a long list of tracking applications that can be downloaded on many different types of smartphones. All the major brands are represented – iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile. If you don’t have a smart phone then you might want to take a look at some of the other tracking apps that we covered in our post about free GPS tracking applications and software. There is plenty there that can be used on many different types of cell phones.

What you will find in these links is free cell phone tracking software. There is a lot of paid software out there. These can cost you anywhere between $5 from your app store to $60 for full fledged cell phone spy software. Some of these are worth the money and then some. Others are not worth the crap the monkeys who coded the software evacuated from their bowels while mashing away at the keyboard. This might be because they are worthless programs or because you can do the same exact thing with free apps that cost you nothing (the unnecessary reiteration is intentional!). Choosing the right software for your needs is obviously important, so take your time in determining exactly what you need the cell phone tracking software for and educate yourself on what some of the different free options are going to be able to do for you. They are often extremely powerful and capable of doing exactly what you want without having to fork out any more cash.

Once you have picked your app then the next question is going to be how to download the cell phone tracking software. This really depends on what type of cell phone you have. Here is a breakdown of what you can expect for each type of phone:

How to Download Tracking Software To A Smartphone

Smartphones benefit from being better than other, normal cell phones. They are, after all, smart. Almost every major brand of cell phone has an app store that you can go to and download the software to your phone automatically. The best part is, once it is downloaded, all the installation is taken care of for you. You don’t need to know a ton of stuff to get it work. Just choose what you want, tell it to download, and you are done.

Here is an example from an Android cell phone. There are two main ways that you can download the ever popular InstaMapper cell phone tracking software. You can go to the Android market and then search for “GPS Tracker.” Then look for the result withe InstaMapper, LLC as the publisher. Click on install and you will download and install the app seamlessly.

If you have a QR code reader just scan this:

InstaMapper Cell Phone Tracking Software QR Code

It really is that easy to download software with a smart phone.

How to Download Tracking Software To A Regular Cell Phone

GPS tracking software becomes a little more difficult when you are not working with the easy, breezy smartphones. Don’t take my word for it. Here is what the folks at InstaMapper recommend for downloading their software when using one of the Motorola iDen phones that you can get on the cheap:

The easiest way to Install InstaMapper on your phone is by loading it over-the-air using this tool provided by Sprint:

http://144.230.114.35/adp1/FUN/index.jsp?output=100

The tool will ask you for a .zip file, which you can get here.

Then go to Menu -> Games & Apps -> Download Apps. Click on “New Purchases”. If you don’t see the app there, navigate to Menu -> My Info on your phone and hit “Edit”. If Line 1 is empty, enter your full phone number there (starting with the area code). Then try downloading the app again.

Alternatively, you can install the app from your PC using a regular USB cable and Motorola’s iDEN Java Application Loader (JAL) software. The latter can be downloaded directly from Motorola here (free registration required; click “join MotoDev” when they ask you for your login information). After JAL is installed, connect your phone to the PC with a USB cable, start JAL, and hit “Connect to phone”. Unzip InstaMapper tracking software to a folder on your PC, then hit “Download” and select “GPSTracker.jad” from that folder. Hit “Disconnect” when the transfer completes.

Now start the app you just downloaded — it will be under “Java Apps”, possibly on the second screen (hit “More”). The app is called “GPS Tracker” and has an icon that looks like a satellite. Enter the device id from your InstaMapper account. Click “Save”. The phone will ask for your permission to access the GPS chip. Say “yes”. When the status message changes from “Locating…” to “Tracking…” your should be able to see the location of your phone on InstaMapper.

Note: the app will pop into foreground during the first few days of operation (the intention here is to discourage covert tracking). Unfortunately, on Motorola phones a notification sound is played whenever an application requests to be run in the foreground. We recommend leaving the app in the foreground during the first few days that it’s running, or muting notification sounds in the phone’s settings.

This is certainly doable, but it does break down significantly for someone who really is not too certain what they are doing.

Special Note On “Cell Phone Spy” Software

Unfortunately, the experience users have to go through to install cell phone spy software is a lot like installing something on a regular cell phone. This is because a lot of the publishers out there for this type of software don’t go through app stores and just sell them directly to customers. This makes these things notoriously difficult to install and get running. To me, this is their greatest failing. How can you use this type of spy software if you can’t even get it loaded on a phone?

If you are going to go this route I would urge extreme caution. Only buy something with a solid money back guarantee so you can recoup your money if you can’t get it installed correctly or if your phone isn’t supported.

How To Download Cell Phone Tracking Software

If you are trying to download and install mobile phone tracking software then you should hope that you have a smartphone. 🙂 In reality, it is very easy to download most trackers to your cell – even if you just have a regular old phone. If all else fails, follow the instructions on the website for the software you are trying to download.

Beware of Unwanted Cell Phone Tracking Software

The Internet is abuzz with the latest news that some GPS-enabled cell phones are automatically sending information like your GPS coordinates to third parties, often without notifying you of this activity.  The first to fall into this PR fiasco was the Palm Pre, which had their continuous and constant GPS tracking discovered by Joey Hess.  While the allegations that this cell phone tracking software actually is constant and continuous has not been officially confirmed or denied by Palm or major news outlets, there is a pretty damning statement released by Palm that seems to indicate that Mr. Hess finding are gospel truth:

Palm takes privacy very seriously, and offers users ways to turn data collecting services on and off. Our privacy policy is like many policies in the industry and includes very detailed language about potential scenarios in which we might use a customer’s information, all toward a goal of offering a great user experience. For instance, when location based services are used, we collect their information to give them relevant local results in Google Maps. We appreciate the trust that users give us with their information, and have no intention to violate that trust.

To me, this is a muddy statement that admits to the use of GPS cell phone tracking software to gather information on a users location.  While Palm is claiming that they would never do anything bad with this information, there is little doubt that a lot of bad can be done.

Palm Pre Cell Phone Tracking SoftwareAnother key issue with the Palm Pre debacle is that they did a piss poor job of informing users about the tracking going on behind the scenes.  Sure, they probably included it in their privacy policy – but let’s be honest here, no one, and I mean no one reads a privacy policy these days.  They are long.  They are boring.  And we generally have a hard time sifting through the legalese to find the real information that we want to know. One blogger pointed out that the responsible thing for Palm to have done in regards to their GPS cell phone tracking would have been to have forced users to opt in to the “feature” rather than turning it on automatically. That seems pretty sensible to me, but for whatever reason the folks at Palm decided otherwise.

The second brouhaha currently fomenting on the Internets is that some of the GPS cell phone tracking software for the iPhone sends your position information to third parties whenever you use certain apps. According to one developer friendly to hacking the iPhone (so they cannot be implicitly trusted) there is one mobile phone analytics package that is particularly “spyware-esque.” The name of the spyware-esque mobile phone analytics is Pinch Media and they provide support for several different iPhone apps.

What is reported as going on is that these applications using Pinch Media track the following information:

  • Your iPhone’s unique ID – which can link you directly to any activity that the phone engages in
  • iPhone model
  • OS version
  • Application version (in this case, camera zoom 1.x)
  • If the application is cracked/pirated
  • If your iPhone is jailbroken
  • Time and date you start the application
  • Time and date you close the application
  • Your current latitude & longitude
  • Your gender (if Facebook enabled)
  • Your birth month (if Facebook enabled)
  • Your birth year (if Facebook enabled)

That is a lot of data for a third party to have about you and your iPhone use.  While the iPhone does manually require that you opt in to all location monitoring applications, they do not necessarily require that developers disclose the exact bits of information being tracked or where they are being sent off to.

There is a text document that is terribly hard to read that offers some more information about different apps that are the worst privacy offenders.  It can be found here: http://textbin.com/y6223

Automatic Cell Phone Tracking Software and Privacy

The privacy implications of these actions by corporations is huge.  All steps down the road to tyranny begin with but a single step, and this is not good news for our children 50-75 years from now.  Once corporations and government agencies begin gathering this type of information on us it is going to be a short road to some form of oppressive regime.  If they aren’t trying to control us with fear, they will be trying to do it with pleasure – and the only solution that I can see is to make hard stands now as consumers.

While we are huge proponents of the massive benefit that can be derived from GPS tracking, we also feel like that this information should not be used for marketing or other purposes.  Placing a financial incentive on a person’s location information is only going to degrade a human brother into an object sought after for their capital and not as a person with thoughts, feelings and emotions.

We are huge fans of free GPS cell phone tracking software, thinking that it can help parents stay connected to their children, provide an awesome safety net for people of all ages, improve our fitness levels through fitness tracking programs, and even help us stay connected to our friends.  In time we hope to see GPS make commuting and all driving more efficient and “earth friendly,” end abduction and other forms of personal assault, and help keep the criminal element at bay.

Unfortunately, privacy concerns like the ones raised against Palm Pre and the iPhone will prevent ground being taken toward these ends.  While the cell phone tracking software could be utilized for great good for a great number of people, I fear that it will probably only be used to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.  That is not the future for GPS tracking that I would want, but it seems to be the future that just might be.