[FRIAM] Google, GPS and "We know where you are."

[Stephen Guerin]

A couple years ago, we did a vis with Nathan Eagle at MIT Media Lab that tracked
100 media lab and sloan school faculty and students' locations based on
interpolated tower info. Click on the first visualization:
  http://reality.media.mit.edu/viz.php

The location of the users was augmented by each phone pinging for nearby
bluetooth IDs to give 10m proximity information. There's quite a bit of
interesting information to be extracted. Here's a powerpoint of Nathan's
findings presented at a Where 2.0 conference:
  http://conferences.oreillynet.com/presentations/where2005/eagle_update.ppt

We did have identity information from the volunteer subjects, though. As Roger
writes, Google claims to only collect non-identifying tower info...

-Stephen


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Roger Critchlow [mailto:rec at elf.org] 
> Sent: Monday, December 03, 2007 9:08 AM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Google, GPS and "We know where you are."
> 
> Well, according to this slashdot:
> 
>   http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/23/196229
> 
> which points to this Washington Post article:
> 
>   
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/2
> 2/AR2007112201444_pf.html
> 
> the feds have been routinely asking for and getting real time 
> cell tower tracking information from your phone provider, 
> even though it runs counter to DoJ guidelines.  So that's 
> with access to the cell phone infrastructure but it's roughly 
> the same information that GoogleMaps is using to locate your 
> phone without GPS. 
> 
> As for bugging your phone, sure, it would  be no problem to 
> write a small program which ran on your Treo, woke up 
> regularly, checked the cell id's on the closest towers, and 
> SMS'ed that information to someone who was interested.  You 
> might notice the extra interference on your car FM radio if 
> you have a GSM phone, you might notice the SMS charges on 
> your phone bill, or you might walk around announcing your 
> location until the phone broke. 
> 
> But the pings, the handshakes with the cell towers, are 
> infrastructural, they're your phone's business and the phone 
> company's business, and they only go further if your phone or 
> your phone company explicitly shares them. 
> 
> The precision depends on the density of the towers and how 
> well the intersecting sectors have been mapped by GPS phones. 
>  While GMaps is active on the phone, it's reading out the 
> id's for the nearest tower/cells and the signal strength for 
> each id.  If the phone has GPS, it sends the cell id's/signal 
> strength and the GPS location to mother google for her world 
> map.  If the phone has no GPS, it just sends the cell 
> id's/signal strength to mother google.  She checks her map 
> and sends back an estimated location and error.  That it's 
> not working around Santa Fe probably means that there aren't 
> many, or any, GPS enabled phones running GoogleMaps and 
> reporting actual locations around these parts. 
> 
> But Google can't ping your phone, it's your phone that pings 
> the towers to maintain its connectivity.  And Google only 
> collects the tower id/signal strength/location information, 
> because collecting identities would be evil, not to mention 
> hideously expensive given that there is one cell phone for 
> every two people on earth as of last thursday: 
> 
>   http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/29/213245
> 
> -- rec --
> 
> 
> On Dec 3, 2007 1:10 AM, Tom Johnson < tom at jtjohnson.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 	Colleagues:
> 	
> 	In recent days, Google announced the beta of some 
> software for a GPS-equipped mobile phones.  See 
> http://tinyurl.com/yrvfo3
> 	The way it works is by picking up a signal from cell 
> towers, it indicates the phone's location with a blue dot on 
> Google's Mobil Maps.  (For what it's worth, I have Google 
> Mobile Maps on my Treo 650, but I have yet to get this 
> version to work.) 
> 	
> 	Here's my question:
> 	
> 	Would it be possible for the Google mothership to do 
> the equivalent of "pinging" my phone number, not to make a 
> call but to see if (a) the phone is on and if so (b) where is 
> that phone?  The phone wouldn't ring, so the user would have 
> no idea he/she is being geo-located.  I assume that if Google 
> could do that, those phone numbers and geocodes could easily 
> become a data base appropriate for some interesting data 
> mining, both as a static bit of insight and if done, say, 
> every hour, whew.  What a rich pile of insight for all sorts 
> of people, businesses and survey agencies.  Putting aside 
> issues of a person's privacy, just the collective data about 
> where that particular phone is going -- forget who owns it -- 
> would be rather amazing and useful to some. 
> 	
> 	So, back to the questions:  
> 	
> 	1) Would those pings of a phone be possible?  
> 	2) Would the results reflect location and movement of 
> that phone down to what degree of distance today?  Are we 
> talking meters or kilometers or ???? 
> 	3) And if Google wasn't doing the pinging, could anyone 
> who had my phone number track my location and/or distance 
> from any originating dialing point/server?
> 	
> 	Thanks,
> 	Tom Johnson
> 	
> 	-- 
> 	==========================================
> 	J. T. Johnson
> 	Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
> 	www.analyticjournalism.com
> 	505.577.6482 (c)                                 505.473.9646(h)
> 	http://www.jtjohnson.com                 tom at jtjohnson.com
> 	
> 	"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. 
> 	To change something, build a new model that makes the 
> 	existing model obsolete."
> 	                                                  -- 
> Buckminster Fuller
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