Tag: free cell phone tracking software

Real Time GPS Tracking

When most people think of tracking someone they think of real time GPS tracking. They want to know exactly where a person or object is at any given moment of time. They want to sit at their computer and be able to follow the tracker’s movements on a Google Maps like interface. In essence, people want to be a little like God – knowing where someone is at any given moment in the day.

If you haven’t tried it, you should.

What follows is a look at some of the common questions people might have about real time GPS tracking. Its not a definitive list, its just a start.

What Is Real Time GPS Tracking?

Real time GPS tracking is the process where a device communicates its position over a wireless communication network to a 3rd party. This third party then makes the information available on the Internet for the user to access.

Essentially the device is a combination of a GPS and a cell phone. Once the GPS figures out where you are the cell part of the tracker sends that information to the tracking provider. The provider takes the raw data, puts it on a map, and then lets you look at the map online in a slick interface that often uses Google Maps.

Like I said before, if you haven’t tried it yet you should.

How Does Real Time GPS Tracking Work?

The process is called trilateration and it involves some math. Some fancy math at that. But what you need to know is that there are dozens of satellites in orbit around the wolrd right now put up there by the folks in the United States Airforce. These satellites put out a constant stream of low energy radio signals that have data encoded in them.

Your GPS tracking device receives these signals and is able to calculate how far it is away from each of the satellites it receives the message from. Once it has 4 of these distances calculated it can determine its location on the surface of the earth to within just a few meters.

Now that it has calculated its position it will now try and broadcast the information to the tracking provider. Some real time trackers use cell phone networks to do this transmission while others use communication satellites. Both have their place, but most tracking devices that work in real time are going to work off of a cell phone network.

Once this information is calculated and transmitted the tracking provider gives you access to the information through a website. Sometimes they will let you share the info in a widget on a personal blog or Facebook, or they might let you send secure text messages or emails with your location to a select group of people.

Can You Block A Real Time Tracker?

Yes. And blocking is actually much easier than you think. Let’s say that you think you are being tracked by someone against your will and in an illegal way. Perhaps an estranged ex-boyfriend is showing up in strange places. Definitely call the police and have them do a once over of your vehicle, but then go out and buy a GPS blocker. (Update 4/16/2012:  GPS jammers are illegal and should not be used.  After several events in recent years the US government has really began to crack down on GPS jammers since they pose a significant risk to public safety and  national infrastructure.  Consumers should not buy these devices unless they are approved by the FCC.  Any jammer in use should be retired and an alternative method to ensure location privacy should be employed since penalties for jammer use could exceed $100,000 and include jail time.)

This small device will scramble the incoming GPS signals so that they can’t get to the device. The tracker will be unable to tell where it is and the tracking will stop. These devices generally have to be plugged into your car and have an effective sphere of several yards. They are illegal in some places, so be sure to check to see if you are allowed to own and operate them in your car.

There are other ways to stop real time tracking that don’t involve owning a potentially illegal device. If the device is your cell phone then turn the phone completely off (and take out the battery if needed). This will prevent anyone from using your phone as a tracking device.

Types Of Real Time GPS Tracking:

There are a few different types of real time tracking. Here is a brief synopsis of each of them to give you an idea of what exactly they are.

Car tracking devices

Real time car tracking devices come in two main varieties: hardwired and stand alone. There are benefits to each of them, but in most applications a hardwired device is going to be the way that you want to go. Hardwired real time trackers benefit from getting their power from the vehicle itself, making nearly continuous, long term tracking a possibility.

This is incredibly important for tracking a teen driver, recovering a stolen vehicle, or improving fleet performance. Some hardwired trackers do require a professional installation or some familiarity with vehicle electronics. Others are so easy to install you can do it yourself. Just slide it into the OBD-II port and you are good to go.

Stand alone real time trackers will work just like the hardwired variety and have the same costs but will need to constantly have their battery recharged. Let’s use the popular stand alone tracker, the Zoombak, to get some sort of bearing on the difference between the two. According to the Zoombak website, the tracker can perform 150 locates (determining the device’s position via GPS and then transmitting that information over a wireless network to Zoombak) before the battery runs out. If you only do 1 locate every 3 minutes you only have 7.5 hours of constant, real time tracking with the Zoombak. You will need to recharge the device a lot if you want to use it for certain applications.

Don’t get me wrong, it will still work and may even work better in certain applications. You just want to make sure you know what you are getting into.

Cell phone tracking software

Did you know that cell phones are the most widely used real time GPS tracking devices in the world? Its true. It was on CNN:

Pretty much any cell phone can be located in real time just by being turned on. Not all cell phones can be located by YOU, but they can be located by your cell phone carrier who can then give that information to the police or some other government agency. Some cell phones have the capability to contact third parties if special software is installed on them.
It is this software than can turn a cell phone into a real time tracking device for normal people like you and me.

There are two types of software out there that let you track a phone in real time. The first is free GPS cell phone tracking software. Some of these free tracking programs are actually incredibly powerful and let you do tons of things with them. Most free trackers are designed to be used by willful participants and are not necessarily going to work as secret real time GPS trackers. Things like Google Latitude, InstaMapper’s GPS Tracker, and Lookout Mobile Security can give you pinpoint locations for the cell phone – they just all require account creation and are easily accessed from any smartphone.

Paid real time GPS tracking programs are also available, but these only should be purchased if you are trying to do something very specific that a free tracker will not allow you to do. One thing that a lot of paid services provide is cell phone monitoring in addition to the real time tracking. These services let you see incoming and outgoing calls, read text messages, and see Internet usage. These programs are extremely powerful and can be set up to run “silently” so the user of the phone doesn’t know that they are there.

Personal GPS trackers

Iceberg
Don't get trapped adventuring without a real time GPS tracking device!

Personal real time GPS tracking devices are generally about one thing – safety. If you can imagine a group or community that might benefit from having their position readily accessible by concerned loved ones then you can rest assured that there is probably already a tracking devices for that market. There are real time trackers for kids, for teenagers, for Alzheimer’s patients, and for outdoor adventurers– just to name a few.

None of these trackers can hold a candle to the sheer amount of data that they can collect when compared to a built in GPS tracker in a car, but in a pinch these devices can save a life. They suffer from short battery life since they try to be small and concealable. Some only have a real time battery life of a few hours. However, most of these devices are better when used on demand. You simply find there device when you actually want to.

The Future of Real Time GPS Tracking

Everyone is going to be using this technology in the future. If not for themselves then in some other way that benefits them. Governments are becoming increasingly aware that providing real time data on public transportation improves user’s experience. Companies are realizing that tracking data is fun and interactive. And privacy barriers are being increasingly eroded by childhoods saturated in Internet culture. The question that still remains for use to determine is how we will own this new technology and make it integral parts of our lives in the future. Real time GPS tracking is the future. Is that a future you are looking forward to?

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.

Is Free Cell Phone Tracking Really Free?

We are all aware of the many different free GPS tracking software applications that are available for cell phones. The different developers and tracking companies who provide this software have done so out of the goodness of their hearts and the hope that the advertising in the application or the up sell market is going to make them some money. Even if they do not monetize these tracking systems they are at least hoping that the reputation they establish will benefit them in some other way in the future.

Either way, you have a market today where there are dozens of 100% free to use cell phone GPS tracking systems. But the question is, are these free cell phone tracking systems really free?

I think that as we look deeper into this issue we are going to find that the answer is that it depends on a person’s particular circumstances. But in order for any of the discussion of cost to make sense to us we first need to establish a basic understanding of how free cell phone tracking actually works.

How Free Cell Phone Tracking Works

When coming to this question we need to divide our understanding into two distinct parts. The first is how does the cell phone determine where it is in the world. The second is how does the cell phone communicate that information to outside parties. Once we understand these things we will see just how free free GPS tracking really is.

For the first part we need to look at the principle of trilateration. This geometric rule says that if you know your distance from three or more known points you can determine your exact location. Cell phones that can be tracked tap into this geometric principle via GPS. The way this works is like this:

iPhone GPS Tracking
iPhones are extremely popular and can be used as GPS tracking devices.

Certain phones (iPhones, Blackberries, and other smartphones) have a GPS receiver installed in them when they are made. Once the phone is bought and activated by a user the full functionality of the GPS can come alive, all it needs is for the cell phone to be turned on (some GPS functionality, like GPS tracking, will also require that the cell phone be receiving a signal, but more on that later). If you do not have a GPS-enabled cell phone then you cannot take advantage of the free cell phone tracking available for download on the Internet.

The second part we need to understand about GPS tracking with cell phones is how these devices transmit the position information that they gather from the GPS. For this, cell phones are going to need to have access to one of two things: the Internet or GPRS. Once the cell phone has its location from the GPS receiver it will then process filter it through the free cell phone tracking software. This software will package the information in such a way that it can be made available online for the for the users friends or family to view.

If the free online GPS cell phone tracking software is a real time tracker, this information is going to be sent in a nearly continuous basis for as long as the program is running on the phone and the phone is receiving a signal from a cell phone tower. If either of these items is lost, so is the real time tracking ability of the software.

So now that we have a cursory understanding of how free cell phone tracking services work I hope that it is fairly clear how this can be less than free for some people. The main points of cost are in the cell phone itself and in the data plan that you must have in order to make use of the tracking software.

The Costs: GPS Enabled Cell Phones

The free, online GPS cell phone tracking software ceases to be free when you have to upgrade your phone to one that is compatible with the software and that has GPS installed in it. Some of these phones can be pretty pricey. An iPhone 3G will run you $99 and a Blackberry Curve can run you $129. This is certainly not free. Now if you already owned one of these mobile phones then downloading the free GPS tracking software onto your mobile phone isn’t going to cost you anything extra.

This is why up above I mentioned that the answer to the question posed in the title of this article was, “It depends.”

The Costs: The Data Plan

The second cost that is going to be associated with GPS cell phone tracking is going to be that data plan on your phone. I recently looked to see if this was something that my wife and I should get on our cell phone plan. She was about to get a free upgrade for her old phone and some Blackberries were available. But in looking at the data plans her carrier offered it would cost an additional $30 a month. Since we wouldn’t have gotten the data plan otherwise this seemed like a lot of money to us.

As a result, she went with another phone instead (the LG Envy) because there was no use in getting the Blackberry since we weren’t going to pony up the cash for the data plan. Paying $30 a month will quickly turn into $360 over the course of one year. That is a lot to be paying for a “free” GPS cell phone tracking service.

Can GPS Tracking Truly Be Free

But this leads us to another important point – GPS tracking is probably never going to be free in my lifetime. There are too many powers that be that have a vested interest in making me pay for this type of information. If it is not the GPS manufacturers, it is going to be the cell phone companies that I would be using to send my position information wireless to my wife who would be sitting at a computer, checking out where I am online. At almost every point in the system there is someone to pay. So, if you are already paying all those people then you can say that your cell phone tracking is free – but it is not truly free.