Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Interesting thought
I am sure many of you have thought about this before...But I have mostly chosen not to pick through the details of everything and as result I am much less paranoid. But the thought that was brought up today at work was related to cell phones.
Now many of us have cell phones with clocks in them. One of the men at work then noted that when you cross the border of Quebec the clock on you phone changes almost immediately.
My thought, well it is keyed into some signal somewhere which give it the time. His thought was that the people at the phone company know exactly where you are, cause they can change the time on your phone.
A little more thought too, is that when you are in any given city you don't have to pay long distance. I would not be surprised if you could be tracked by the phone and perhaps there are people with better knowledge than me. My thoughts on this however are more related to the signals from the phone company towers and your phone is keyed into them and no one actually knows where you are.
Newer phones have GPS while any phone can be tracked to the transmission tower it is talking to at any given time. Not sure which one your coworker with the instantaneous clock change might have, one way to find out would be to take it on the boat to newfoundland and see if the time changes even when the phone is out of service range.
If you have a GPS cellphone, then it works like any other GPS. Tracking via a cellular network can be difficult if the network isn't designed for it. There are different cell topographics which vary the size of the actual cell area (the area covered by a cell tower, not the phone). There are large cells which cover a large area which are common used in less populated/rural areas. cells in a large city are much smaller, some ranging the size of a few city blocks. You can trianglate a position with rough precision using the data of which towers are receiving a signal from a cellphone and the relative signal strength, however barriers (e.g. concrete walls) will affect it. In larger cells, it's pretty difficult to get an accurate location as the lack of data points is probably the case.
