Slashgeo

Slashdot has a story about legal battles over cellphone tracking. Copied from slashdot: "stupefaction writes "The New York Times reports on recent successful court challenges to police use of cellphone tracking information in the course of an investigation. From the article: 'In the last four months, three federal judges have denied prosecutors the right to get cellphone tracking information from wireless companies without first showing "probable cause" to believe that a crime has been or is being committed. That is the same standard applied to requests for search warrants. [...] Cellular operators like Verizon Wireless and Cingular Wireless know, within about 300 yards, the location of their subscribers whenever a phone is turned on.'""

Update : The news is now on SlashDot as well.

Yahoo News is currently running an article about Google's new endeavor. From their summary, "Internet search leader Google Inc said on Wednesday it is introducing a novel mapping system that uses cell phone towers to let mobile phone users locate nearby services without typing in addresses.

Google's new My Location service is being offered in test mode to U.S. users and is designed to expand the percentage of cellphone users of location-aware services, whether or not their phones come equipped with satellite-locating chips.". Head on over there for the full scoop.

As you may or may not know Google Maps is able to pinpoint a mobile device based upon the CELLID of the cell tower that you are communicating on. I was wondering if ther is a database provider of this type of data. I was able to find the following services or databases:

Yahoo Zone Tag
Celldb.org
gsmloc.org
cellspotting.com

Are you aware of any others?

Aaron Bodbyl-Mast writes "Bruce Sterling highlights an intriguing app being developed for the Google Android Developer Challenge. The video provides a nice demonstration of the app, as well as a description of future plans for the technology including integration of a gyroscope and the use of 3d buildings models. I think this is just of the type of iceberg. I also imagine that we will be seeing a similar concept integrating GPS and Street View. As the Instapundit would say: Bring it on!" The name of the project is Enkin, and the video over the URL above explains clearly what it's all about. It is so interesting that I'm pretty sure we'll see that kind of tool widely offered on phones in a few years. Previous Android stories copied below.

Announced earlier this week, the Yahoo! Internet Location Platform has been discussed by many geoblogs, including Yahoo's Dan Catt and CNET. Yahoo! has been very active regarding geospatial development in the last few years despite the attention towards Google and Microsoft. From the official page: "The Yahoo! Internet Location Platform provides a resource for managing all geo-permanent named places on Earth. Our purpose in creating the Internet Location Platform is to provide the Yahoo! Geographic Developer Community with the vocabulary and grammar to describe the world's geography in an unequivocal, permanent, and language-neutral manner. The Internet Location Platform is designed to facilitate spatial interoperability and geographic discovery; users can traverse the spatial hierarchy, identify the geography relevant to their users and their business, and in turn, unambiguously geotag, geotarget, and geolocate data across the Web. [...] In simple terms, the Service allows you to look up the unique identifier - called the Where on Earth ID, or WOEID - for almost any named place on the Earth; it also allows you to resolve a WOEID you have received from a third party - such as Fire Eagle or Upcoming - to the place it represents."

This story has been discussed earlier this week (that's why it is not fully shown on our main page), however, the summary below provides a additional link regarding the privacy concerns.

om_henners writes "The Register reports that shopping centres in the UK are now monitoring the movements of shoppers by tracking communication between mobile phones and base stations. Path Intelligence (the developers of this technology) claims users are very difficult to identify, and impossible to track for extended periods of time. However it does raise a number of privacy concerns.

This technology does have interesting applications in market research (how far will you walk for fish and chips?) and as time passes is likely to become more and more prevalent as both commercial and security entities realise the applications."

Slashdot currently has an article on the subject. Head on over to their site to see the many reactions from the huge slashdot community. Here is their summary : "'New research that makes creative use of sensitive location-tracking data from 100,000 cellphones in Europe suggests that most people can be found in one of just a few locations at any time, and that they do not generally go far from home.' More interesting than their conclusion, however, is how they got their data. 'The researchers said they used the potentially controversial data only after any information that could identify individuals had been scrambled. Even so, they wrote, people's wanderings are so subject to routine that by using the patterns of movement that emerged from the research, "we can obtain the likelihood of finding a user in any location." The researchers were able to obtain the data from a European provider of cellphone service that was obligated to collect the information. By agreement with the company, the researchers did not disclose the country where the provider operates.' Any guesses which European country requires cell phone providers to record where their customers make calls, and then allows them to give that data away without disclosing that they have done so?"

The Map Room blog brings us some detail information about the new built in iPhone 3G gps functionality. I believe they're calling it AGPS, but here is an excerpt from their blog : "iPhone 3G uses signals from GPS satellites, Wi-Fi hot spots, and cellular towers to get the most accurate location fast. If GPS is available, iPhone displays a blue GPS indicator. But if you’re inside — without a clear line of sight to a GPS satellite — iPhone finds you via Wi-Fi. If you’re not in range of a Wi-Fi hot spot, iPhone finds you using cellular towers. And the size of a location circle tells you how accurately iPhone is able to calculate that location: The smaller the circle, the more accurate the location."

For more information as well as some sample links, please visit the blog link above.