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Your mobile provider will be just as helpful with law enforcement. They've been selling your location data for a long time.
by fucking_tragedy 8y ago
Your mobile provider will be just as helpful with law enforcement. They've been selling your location data for a long time.
- tjpnz 8y agoI'm surprised how you don't hear about this information being used in missing persons cases.
- izacus 8y agoIt doesn't bring clicks, outrage or Apple advertisers out of the woods, so it also doesn't get featured on HN. But it's certanly used to track missing persons and kidnappings for a long while now.
- jacquesm 8y agoIt isn't all that useful. A friend has a business that helps LE on missing persons cases and while cell phone tower data can give at least an idea on where a phone was on last it does not say anything about whether that phone was still in the possession of the person that it belonged to and whether or not that is simply where it ran out of juice. It may give a vector for general direction of travel. So while it may be useful it is not a magical device, and more often than not leads to a lot of misdirected effort.
- joking 8y agoIn Spain there was a case of a missing woman, and the authorities tracked phones which moved in the same direction of the victims one to get a reduced list. The attacker disposed of the phone from a bridge after 5 or 10 minutes, but even with that the police have already an small list of suspects and have an start point to investigate. Anyway, they have to wait and they didn't get to trap the attacker until a year later when he tried to attack other victim.
- _bxg1 8y agoTrue, though they only get which cell towers you're connected to, not your actual GPS location.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoIn a densely-populated region this could peg you at within a city-block's radius.