4 ms·

This is not a service we provide. It is not a service we have ever provided, nor a service we have any plans to provide. Indeed, it is a not a service we are te

• iamflimflam1 4y ago
  The service is possible: If you are a mobile network operator. Or, you can convince people to install something on their phone that sends you their location along with their phone number.
• ceejayoz 4y ago
  How would you go about reliably providing the location of someone's mobile phone without being their cell phone carrier?
  • jraph 4y ago
    By partnering with said cell phone carriers. But I hope it would be illegal.
    • em_te 4y ago
      If movies have taught us anything, they need to remain on the call for at least 30 seconds for it to be traced.
• simonw 4y ago
  How would this work? If a phone number is for a mobile phone then looking up the location doesn't make sense at all: mobile phones are mobile. I guess you could try and crawl an index of business phone numbers and associate those with the listed address for businesses, but that's a completely different business from running a geocoder. You could provide a bit of geographical information about the first three digits of a US phone number. I imagine that's not what users are actually looking for though.
  • jefftk 4y ago
    Phone numbers have geographic structure. For mobile phones it's just the area code, but for landlines there is also information in the exchange portion. For example, I grew up in Medford MA which is 781-39x-xxxx. I expect there are also patterns in other countries?
    • troutpanda 4y ago
      Yeah, but you can probably use https://github.com/google/libphonenumber https://github.com/google/libphonenumber for that.
    • pixl97 4y ago
      Network portability. While there can be a small amount of correlation to the entire zipcode, that quickly breaks down in portal number blocks and they can end up anywhere in the US. Also, with VOIP it could reference where a number doesn't have long distance fees, but has nothing to do with where it is.
    • PeterisP 4y ago
      > I expect there are also patterns in other countries? No, I believe this concept of mobile phone numbers being tied to localities is specific just to a few countries - USA, Canada and I think South Africa - due to how local calls were billed there; and for all other countries the mobile numbers were allocated from a single country-wide pool so their mobile phone numbers have no geographic structure other than the country code.
      • 9034725985 4y ago
        What if there were a service where anyone can opt in to share their own location information? If there was a way to get across the hurdle of how does the service provider know if the person is indeed who they claim to be… My thought is something like a phone number, email address, or domain name bypasses this problem. It is fairly trivial to verify you have access to a phone number, email address, domain name. Feels like this is one of those chicken and egg problems though. Why would anyone list their location at my service if nobody queries it and why would anyone query my service if nobody lists their information with me?
• cactusplant7374 4y ago
  You mean if they could figure out how to illegally track millions of people?
• insane_dreamer 4y ago
  > a lot of people would be interested in this you mean like scammers and stalkers? (ok, and probably Meta)