GPS Phone Tells Others Where You Are 161
An anonymous reader writes, "According to CNet, a company called Benefon has launched a cell phone with a built in GPS receiver — nothing new there. However, this particular GPS cell phone, called the Twig, does something extra. It can send your GPS coordinates to another Twig owner and then that person can navigate directly to you using the preloaded navigation software. Sounds like this could save a lot of time and effort when trying to explain to the in-laws where your new apartment is." The article says that the phone will cost £330 in the UK, or about $625.
Re:Put your tinfoil hat away (Score:2, Informative)
Becomes widespread? Can you even get a cellphone that isn't GPS enabled in the U.S. any more? AFAIK, all cellphones here have GPS to provide location data for e911, and I know Sprint already offers a service where the owner of a cellular account can get current position information on any phone he/she owns.
Also, what does CALEA [wikipedia.org] have to do with this? While I'm sure there is/will be some precedent allowing law-enforcement to access this data, CALEA only seems to deal with wiretapping, not tracking or remotely controlling phones (or OnStar).
Ham radio did this years ago (Score:3, Informative)
It was developed by a ham radio operator and the Naval Academy:
http://www.aprs.net/ [aprs.net]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APRS [wikipedia.org]
Garmin NavTalk did this in 99 (Score:3, Informative)
You had some control as to who could poll your position, or you could trigger a "send". A couple companies had web sites that would let you see the position of the phones on a map. They did it by decoding the DTMF tones the Garmin spit out.
http://www.garmin.com/products/navTalk/ [garmin.com]
Re:Our GPS-tracking overlords (Score:3, Informative)
Nothing new here (Score:3, Informative)