Your mobile phone is a homing device

national | rights, freedoms and repression | news report

Wednesday February 18, 2004 18:27

by Eoin Dubsky

Irish 02 website offers spying services to employers

When searching the internet for for Irish mobile phone "location based services", I perchanced upon a webpage on the "02" site offering spying services to employers (http://web.o2.ie/portal/business/enhanced_business_solutions/location_based_services/). Its a shame too that the only function they have found for this technology is for surveillance.

"It's not big brother, it's just good business." Or at least that's what the phone company says. When the people being spied upon by their employer signed up for a phone were they told that their boss could use it as a homing device too?

Your mobile phone is given a unique ID by the network when it is switched on and not "out of range". Mobile phone companies could always tell which cell you were on, and so guess that you were within a radius of x metres from suchandsuch a mast (distances depending on environment and stuff like that). So if your phone was on and you were, say, in Shannon town, the network operators could tell.

"She's somewhere in Shannon" is all they could figure though. These days though they can tell exactly where you are (or your phone at least), as if you carried a GPS unit around with you or something. I think they do it by triangulation.

From the 02 website:
"Mobiles can be tracked in a number of ways:

# SMS - send a text 'where is James' and get reply 'James is near grafton street'
# Web - view worker locations via maps on the web
# Reporting - historical reports for route histories and more
# Alerts- alerts you when a mobile has left an area
# MMS - send location maps via MMS to MMS handsets out on call"