Scary link of the day: Instant mobile phone location tracking
Posted: May 21st, 2003 | 3 Comments »FleetOnline – get the mapped location of any consenting phone on any network in Europe for 25p a shot.
I’m slightly torn because this is obviously remarkably cool and useful: instead of your fleet of delivery vans/cabs/salesmen needing full GPS gear with a radio link back to base, they just use their existing mobiles, but they don’t have to do anything other than give one initial SMS-based consent when the FleetOnline account is created.
But that’s just one consent. Admittedly the prey employee can edit settings using the site, such as time windows during which they can’t be tracked. But I’m still scared by the thought of being pressured into this by an employer/spouse/constantly-nagging relative.
More food for thought in this article that also mentions Yahoo’s Find-A-Friend service (which doesn’t seem to exist beyond a couple of press releases). And if you want something meatier on the topic of location-tracking, privacy and policy, this should do the trick.
(Cheers to Balf)
This is spooky. So now I’m actually happy I’m living in the Middle East.
Er, fine, so I’m not really.
… but that’s completely different. The absolute best that ip2location might be able to get you is down to city level (e.g. “This user is in Prague. Probably.”) Usually, it’ll go to country level. If you’re tracking an AOL user, forget using it at all.
FleetOnline can get down to several meters. There’s no comparison.
have a look at where-ru.com for a free online demo.site looks cool too.