Tag: real life gps story

GPS Cell Phone Tracking Finds Stolen Cell Phone, Catches Criminals

There is recent news that an Apple application called MobileMe has been instrumental in recovering a stolen iPhone and catching the individuals who stole it at gunpoint.  This isn’t the first time that a GPS enabled iPhone has been used to catch criminals red handed, and it certainly won’t be the last.  GPS tracking for cell phones is only going to become more prevalent, and stories like this are going to spread the word about just how powerful GPS is on our mobile devices.

According to reports from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the owner of the iPhone was mugged by two individuals around 1 a.m.  The thieves took the man’s wallet, pin numbers, and iPhone while one of the assailants held what appeared to be a gun.  As the police would later discover, the “gun” was just a pellet pistol.

After handing over his belongings, the victim ran away and called police.  The victim then got on a computer and used MobileMe’s Find My iPhone feature to locate his cell phone.  He presumably passed this information along to the police who were then able to track down the thieves at a gas station.

Even though two suspects were involved in the robbery, three were arrested in connection with the crime.

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GPS Tracking As Theft Recovery

Using GPS tracking as a way to recover lost or stolen property is a great way to make use of this powerful technology.  The example from this news story is just one of many different ways that being able to track  your phone could be useful.  What if your purse gets stolen at a night club with your cell phone it?  Or how about your car?  Or your backpack while you are at school?  Wouldn’t it be great if you could just rush over to a computer and be able to give police laser targeted information about where you think your belongings are?  Of course it would.  That is why we think that the use of GPS tracking in cell phones is such an important thing for consumers to do if they can afford it and are able to do so.

In fact, you don’t even have to use the tracking on the cell phone primarily for theft recovery.  Many of the tracking applications available on mobile devices are social in nature, letting friends or family members know where you are during the course of your day.  If this is the type of thing that appeals to you then it also works great as a GPS theft recovery system as well.  All you would need to do to make use of it would be to go to a computer and log on and check out where your phone is.

If you are using the phone to monitor the driving of a teenager then this too will work in the theft recovery role.  Heck, it could even work in a find a lost cell phone role too since teenagers are so absent minded sometimes.  Again, all you would need is to have the phone turned on and for it to be receiving a signal from cell phone towers.  If these conditions are met then just run over to a computer and you can find out exactly where your phone is through the power of GPS.

What Is MobileMe?

The truth of the matter is there are literally dozens of different GPS tracking and phone location programs for cell phones – but the program used in the this particular example was MobileMe for iPhone.  This is a subscription program that currently runs for $99 a year (~$8.30 a month).  If this were just a GPS tracking application then this would be way over priced, but it isn’t just a tracking app.

It allows iPhone users to sync there data between their personal computer, whether it is a laptop or a desktop.  You are given a single email account (johndoe@me.com) that is always kept up-to-date.  If you check your email on your iPhone while you are out on the town then when you get home that email is going to be marked as read.  The same is true of your work PC as well.  This can be a pretty useful feature for on the go professionals or students.

Another feature is the ability to push contacts from your iPhone to your PC without having to hook anything up.  If you are out and you meet a client, contact, or study partner that you want to shoot an email all you will have to do is get their information into your cell phone and the information will automatically be synced with your Outlook account or Address Book on your Mac.

The last push feature that MobileMe offers is the push calander option.  Like the other two features, this turns your iPhone it the perfect mobile calendaring device.  You don’t have to worry about manually updating your home calendar of manually syncing your different devices together to make sure that appointments you make at your desk get put into your cell phone and vice versa.  MobileMe takes care of it all and does so seamlessly.

You also get a cool photo gallery feature, online file storage, and access to me.com.

In additional to all this, they have a Find My iPhone feature that is the source of interest in this news story. What this feature does is it allows users to put a special message on a lost or stolen iPhone, wipe person data from your iPhone remotely, and get a GPS derived location of your cell phone.

As you might suspect, each of these features is pretty powerful. Being able to display a message on your phone could help in the event that you forgot is somewhere. You could say something like, “Oi! I left my mobile phone at the coffee shop. I am on my way to pick it up right now. Please leave it at the counter for me please.” Or if it is stolen you could say something like, “You shall not steal. – God.” Either way, you get a message across that will keep your cell phone safe and hopefully get it back into your hands quickly.

The information wipe feature is also useful because it helps protect your privacy and the privacy of those on your list. Do you really want a thief to have the information of all your most intimate contacts? Do you want them to know your Grandma’s address? Or know where all your girlfriends live? No! Being able to wipe this data off your phone is a very useful feature.

And finally, MobilMe lets you find the location of your phone. If it didn’t this news story wouldn’t be much of a story.

Is all this worth $99 a year? For some it is going to be. For others it will not be. Thankfully, there are other options for those who want to use GPS tracking on their cell phone for theft recovery.

Free GPS Applications For The iPhone

Many phones on the market have the ability to be tracked with GPS, not just “cool” mobile phones like the iPhone. As a result, there are many free tracking programs available for a wide range of mobile device. Many of these programs only work with subset of all the GPS enabled cell phone on the market, so finding one that works for your particular phone is going to take some work – but free is a really nice word, so the work is worth it.

One free GPS tracking software package that is particularly well received is Instamapper. This program works on a lot of different phones and communicates the tracking information in a lot of different ways. It is completely free to use (but check out some warnings about free GPS cell phone tracking) so you really have no reason not to at least give it a try. It could be the difference between catching a criminal and letting them get away with their crime.

New York Requires Warrant To GPS Track Suspects

If you were one of the people scared out of your mind that some states like Wisconsin allow warrantless GPS tracking of cars then you can breath a sigh of relief in knowing that not all the courts in our nation agree.  New York, in a recent court decision, ruled that police in the state must have a warrant when placing a GPS tracking device on a suspects car – joining Washington and Oregon who already have rulings in places ensuring this.

The New York court differed from the Wisconsin one in one major way – the New York court seemed to think that GPS tracking was in fact different from physical surveillance or other technological forms of tracking (like a radio frequency emitter).  The court wrote:

Here, we are not presented with the use of a mere beeper to facilitate visual surveillance during a single trip. GPS is a vastly different and exponentially more sophisticated and powerful technology that is easily and cheaply deployed and has virtually unlimited and remarkably precise tracking capability. […]  Constant, relentless tracking of anything is now not merely possible but entirely practicable …. GPS is not a mere enhancement of human sensory capacity, it facilitates a new technological perception of the world in which the situation of any object may be followed and exhaustively recorded over …  a practically unlimited period. The potential for a similar capture of information or “seeing” by law enforcement would require, at a minimum, millions of additional police officers and cameras on every street lamp.

The majority opinion of the court is trying to make a distinction between the information gathered from physical surveillance of technologically assisted surveillance (the beeper from the 1983 Wisconsin case used as precedent in both this case the more recent Wisconsin case) and that made possible by a GPS tracking device.  The main thrust seems to be that in order to gather similar information on an individual you would need “millions of additional police.”

The court then goes on to discuss the privacy issues involved in GPS tracking cases:

One need only consider what the police may learn, practically effortlessly, from planting a single device. The whole of a person’s progress through the world, into both public and private spatial spheres, can be charted and recorded over lengthy periods …. Disclosed in the data retrieved from the transmitting unit, nearly instantaneously with the press of a button on the highly portable receiving unit, will be trips the indisputably private nature of which takes little imagination to conjure: trips to the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, the gay bar and on and on. What the technology yields and records …  is a highly detailed profile … of where we go,  … of our associations — political, religious, amicable and amorous, to name only a few — and of the pattern of our professional and avocational pursuits. When multiple GPS devices are utilized, even more precisely resolved inferences about our activities are possible. And … it will be possible to tell from … who we are and are not with, when we are and are not with them, and what we do and do not carry on our persons — to mention just a few of the highly feasible empirical configurations.

This judgment reads to me that the court made its decision to deny warrantless GPS tracking because it would give the police a lot of information about a suspects activities and would be much, much cheaper than putting a “tail” on the suspect.

Personally, I can’t seem to make myself agree with the courts rulings.  I am not a lawyer nor am I trained in the law, but it seems to me like the information gather by a GPS tracking device attached to a car could be gather by a physical tail on a suspect – but just at a much greater cost.

A police officer could tell if a person drove their car to a mosque, or a church, or a bar, or a friends house, or to work, or to a soccer game, or to their child’s recital.  All this information would be easily accessible to any person capable of seeing and all of it would be occurring in public space – where people have no fundamental right to privacy.

Granted, GPS tracking a cell phone could provide police with a much larger amount of information that would track a person’s movement’s within completely private places – such as a doctors office, or a church building, or a private club – so perhaps the court’s decision is taking these into consideration as well.

However, I am concerned with the way their ruling could affect the police’s ability to easily and precisely put a tail on a suspects vehicle. GPS tracking for cars will only really track the movements of an individual’s car in public places – something that seems very reasonable for the police to be able to track with GPS.  It is much more cost effective and gives them an opportunity to utilize their skilled officers in other tasks.

In the end, whether or not GPS tracking for cars will require a warrant or not is going to be decided in cases like this all over the country by Appellate courts who are going to differ on what the nature of GPS tracking is and what that means for a person’s 4th Amendment rights.

GPS Tracking In Cell Phone Recovers Missing Child

The other day I was reading some news and stumbled upon a story that had a lot to do with what I talk about here – GPS for kids. On January 3, 2009 Natalie Maltais, a 9-year-old, was abducted. Four days later, with the assistance of GPS, a cell phone, and Google Maps little Natalie was found by authorities who returned her safe and sound to her legal guardians.

There were a lot of interesting things about this article that can teach of some pretty significant things about the use of GPS tracking in recovering out missing children. Some of the more interesting quotes from the article include:

Since the end of 2005, cell phone carriers have been required to provide some way to trace calls to 100 meters or less. To accomplish this, global positioning technology has been integrated in cell phone handsets.

and

Officer Neale … contacted the child’s cell phone provider seeking a way to trace the call.

The company provided him with GPS coordinates every time the phone was activated.

If you want to read the full story you can find it at the following url:

http://www.telegram.com/article/20090107/NEWS/901070289/1116

Lessons About Kids and GPS

This story clearly demonstrates a few key elements of GPS use in abduction situations that should be mentioned.  The first is this – teach your child how to use their cell phone properly in an emergency situation like an abduction.  You can do this by telling your child to do the following:

  1. Keep the cell phone in a secure, hidden location at all times.  Letting an abductor know about the location of a phone is a sure fire way to get in taken away or destroyed.  When in danger, the phone will provide a very safe connect to the outside world.  It will let the police and parents know where a child is – possibly saving their life.
  2. Keep the cell phone quiet.  Again, avoiding detection is the most important thing you can do with your cell phone.  If your ringer goes off or your phone beeps every few minutes because you got a voice mail your phone is going to be found out and taken away.  At the first sign of danger, put the phone on mute and secure it.
  3. Keep the cell phone on. This is very important because this is the only way that the police can use the mobile phone to hone in on your location and to set you free.  An “on” phone is key to your continued safety.

In addition to these proactive steps, you might also want to give your child the following advice:

  1. If there is any doubt if it is safe enough to use the phone, don’t use it.  Wait until you are very certain that you will not be discovered.
  2. Call the police before you call anyone else.  They are best equipped to help you get out of your situation safely.

In addition to these tips on how to use a kids GPS phone successfully, I also noticed some interesting information about child abductions in general.  In this instance, the child was taken by someone they knew – their grandmother.  In the majority of child abductions, children are taken by a close relative.

I am not sure about this particular family’s history, but it sounds like the legal guardians of little Natalie Maltais were not her biological parents.  There must have been some sort of row between the guardians and Natalie’s biological grandmother about how Natalie was being raised.  This argument must have then resulted in the kidnapping of the girl to “save her” from her situation.

In the end, what we really learn from this is that GPS for kids only really works if the children themselves are educated in the use of their tracking devices.  Without the child being an active participant devices can be easily discovered and destroyed by unscrupulous individuals.  It doesn’t matter if it is a GPS tracking watch, a kids GPS phone, or a child locator – if the device is found it is going to be taken.

If you are looking for what program you can download for free onto your child’s cell phone then please take a look at some of the free cell phone trackers that are available for a wide range of mobile phones. There are new apps coming out all the time that could be leveraged to keep your family safe with something as terrible as this were to ever happen to you. Just remember that keeping safe is the number one priority for you child in this situation so keeping the phone on and hidden as long as possible is key.