Thursday, June 5, 2008

Are you being tracked?...

Fox News reports that "Researchers secretly tracked the locations of 100,000 people outside the United States through their cell-phone use and concluded that most people rarely stray more than a few miles from home.
The first-of-its-kind study by Northeastern University raises privacy and ethical questions for its monitoring methods, which would be illegal in the United States.
It also yielded somewhat surprising results that reveal how little people move around in their daily lives.
Nearly three-quarters of those studied mainly stayed within a 20-mile-wide circle for half a year.
The scientists would not say where the study was done, only describing the location as an industrialized nation.
Researchers used cell-phone towers to track individuals' locations whenever they made or received phone calls and text messages over six months.
In a second set of records, researchers took another 206 cell phones that had tracking devices in them and got records for their locations every two hours over a week's time period..."

1 comments:

doloresola said...

It's funny I had received a forward about a week ago about something to the effect of a woman in trouble and the authorities were able to find her by her cellphone signal and that there's a feature on all phones where you have the option of turning your location on or off. I guess that determines whether or not you can be tracked? Seems to be a necesary evil, I guess... but it's scary...