At the same time, there's no conjoint movement to cut back on the encroachments into American civil rights over the past few years, nor do I expect there to be one so long as this administration continues; people have come to expect continuous surveillance, background/credit/affiliations being easily investigated, in cases tagged as "relevant to national security" things like the detention of people without any of the protections we would normally expect in civil society. Recent more subtle changes seem to assist that; for instance, US cell phones are now required to transmit GPS locations (for emergency services, of course...), and Nokia's latest mobile services API makes it possible to write server-side applications that use that location information - without any software being installed on the cell phone. (Nokia isn't the only one, of course; that's just the first example I found to hand) I'll let the technically minded among you imagine a couple of uses for that; it's sort of a fun exercise, if you think about it as though you were a police officer, a private investigator, a marketer, or simply an armed robber.
Shifts in sentiment
At the same time, there's no conjoint movement to cut back on the encroachments into American civil rights over the past few years, nor do I expect there to be one so long as this administration continues; people have come to expect continuous surveillance, background/credit/affiliations being easily investigated, in cases tagged as "relevant to national security" things like the detention of people without any of the protections we would normally expect in civil society. Recent more subtle changes seem to assist that; for instance, US cell phones are now required to transmit GPS locations (for emergency services, of course...), and Nokia's latest mobile services API makes it possible to write server-side applications that use that location information - without any software being installed on the cell phone. (Nokia isn't the only one, of course; that's just the first example I found to hand) I'll let the technically minded among you imagine a couple of uses for that; it's sort of a fun exercise, if you think about it as though you were a police officer, a private investigator, a marketer, or simply an armed robber.
August 15 2005, 21:28:27 UTC 10 years ago
Also, the phone actually doesn't know where it is. It knows where it is in relation to the towers, as it's doesn't exactly receive GPS signals the way a GPS does. It gathers up a bunch of received signals and timings, and ships that off the tower, which sends it to a server, and the server computes the lat/long of the phone, and sends it back to the phone. It's a rather complicated system.
The biggest use (that I know of) for the gps positioning is the CHP 911 call centers (two of them serve the entire state). Apparently, people like to call 911 as they drive by an accident, to report it, but don't actually stop to see if it's been reported. So.. The call centers can get 100s of reports for the same accident. Their solution is simply to block all calls originating from the area of the accident, and for about 2 minutes downstream of the accident. Of course, this leads to other problems (like not being able to report any secondary/tertiary accidents, but the call centers just don't have the bandwidth for the 1000s of concurrent calls that can come in for the dozen or so accidents that have probably happened during the morning commute in the Bay Area.
Also, my information is pretty much only applicable to the CDMA networks. I have 0 experience with GSM. (Nokia is primarily GSM).