Can Somebody Spy On You Using Your Phone's GPS Tracking Device?
If you have ever wondered if someone can spy on you using your phone's GPS tracking device, the answer is yes. The bottom line is that if your cell phone is turned on, your location can be pin pointed exactly by cell phone towers. In fact most cell phones have three towers tracking them at the same time at any given time.
Most contemporary models of cell phones now have global positioning chips that use satellites to determine you coordinates. The reason this is in place is because it is the law established by the Federal Communications (FCC) commission in 2005 that all cell phones have this. This way anyone can be found by emergency responders in an emergency. Most cell phones can broadcast the location of where you are within 100 meters which is really invaluable if you are buried under snow in an avalanche or trapped beneath the rubble of a hurricane ravaged home.
Even though this law, known as the E911 compliancy, was originally put in place to find people in an emergency there are also all kinds of commercial used for this type of tracking. Companies now routinely track their working employees through their cell phones and parents and caregivers also use them to keep track of what their children are doing in the city. Some of these services send text messages to parents if the child or the elderly person strays too far from the location where they are supposed to be.
However another common use of GPS tracking is to spy on people who are cheating or who need to be served with a summons to court. If you suspect someone is trying to track you through your phone the simplest way to avoid to detection is to simply shut off your phone.
You can also avoid detection from phone GPS tracking devices by checking to see if you can turn off the location setting in your phone. Some of the "smarter" phones on the market allow you to turn off location setting or geo settings and just leave it on 911 settings. If you have an older model of phone you may not have this options and the phone may simply track your location by satellite no matter where you are. In fact most phones with GPS can actually locate where you are within a few feet.
This is not great news for those who are trying to hide their activities from other or lying to their boss or wife. In fact if you are taking long lunch breaks to have an affair with someone at a local hotel, all your wife and boss have to do is simply log in your phone number to a service, sit down at a computer and look at where you are on a map.
By the way there are not laws in place to prevent your boss or anyone else from using your cell phone to track you. In fact, many of the social networking sites, including Facebook, also include location tracking as a feature that automatically kicks in the minute you log into the site. So if you are wondering how your boyfriend knows that you are enjoying a glass of red wine at a cozy bistro with your lover Sven instead working out at the gym with your friend Sue then it might be that he has registered your cell phone number with GPS cell phone tracking company.