GPS Phone Tells Others Where You Are

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

[NiteShaed]

he pigs will CALEA all over this as soon as deployment becomes widespread. If they haven't already.

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

[SonicSpike]

Ham radio operators have been doing this for quite a while. It's called Automatic Position Reporting System.

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

[MDMurphy]

The Garmin NavTalk had a phone that did this back in 99 in the US. It was an AMPS phone and sent the positions via quick burst of DTMF tones. It was a cute trick for an analog phone. You could see your position on the map display, the person you were talking to, and get navigation information to lead you to them. They did a GSM version, but if was European only and I never saw that one.

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

[LostCluster]

Really this phone is doing nothing much new, all newly-activated phones in the USA now must have some way of determining the phone location (GPS, tower strengths, whatever) for e911 compliance. This phone is simply giving the user the right to transmit that value to somebody of their own choosing... that's the news.

Nothing new here

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Benefon have been making GPS phones with "you are here" comms for many years now.