Here’s a little something for you paranoid types: Did you know that your smart phone can tell the world your approximate location even without a gps?
I was reading an email from Code Project when I came across this article.
The title is: Learn How to Find GPS Location on Any SmartPhone, and Then Make it Relevant.
From a coder’s point of view this has the potential to be extremely useful, but from the point of view of some guy on the street who would like a little privacy the implications are a frightening.
This is from the coder:
The fact that GPS isn’t (yet) ubiquitous is the real difficulty in location-aware development. The goal here is to get the location from any phone, not just GPS-capable phones. Therein lies the difficulty.
A quick peek under the Mobile Map hood reveals a couple things. First, Google is posting requests to http://www.google.com/glm/mmap for location data. I’ve scoured their APIs, and this isn’t something that appears to be documented. That means, we’re on our own for figuring out how to package and send data. Secondly, it’s clear that they’re sending four key pieces of data:
* Cell Tower ID
* Location Area Code (LAC)
* Mobile Network Code (MNC)
* Mobile Country Code (MCC)That’s great news! As it turns out, almost all cell phones have this data readily available. Windows Mobile (5 and 6) has a native API to get those four pieces of data called the Radio Interface Layer
As you can see, “They” really can watch your every move.
Fortunately there are so many of us that, aside from keywords sniffed by whatever replaced Carnivore or good old fashioned guilt by association, there’s no simple way to decide who to follow. And if your life is anything like mine you’ll just bore the bloody buggers to tears.
