Where Are We? - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 153

Apple or Android—can access online to display the phone's location on a map.
Reports over the past several years from around the world have shown victims
and police using these apps to catch phone thieves. A Chicago executive called
911 after two men mugged him and stole his phone, credit cards, cash, and
driver's license. He provided real-time location information to the operator,
who relayed it to police. The officers found the men at a gas station about a mile
away and held them until the victim arrived and identified them. 36 Sometimes
such cases go awry. A Sherwood, England, resident was stuck with an $800
repair bill after police broke down his door while responding to an incorrect
address provided by phone-tracking software. 37 Such flaws make obtaining a
search warrant increasingly difficult, so police often use other tactics. After a
man robbed a restaurant delivery driver in suburban Atlanta of his phone, cash,
and chicken wings, the driver called police and gave them the phone's location,
which was stationary at a residential address. The officers knocked on the door
and, while they were conversing with the resident, who matched the robber's
description, the victim activated a feature to make the phone ring, precluding
the need for a warrant. 38 Antitheft apps are evolving to include features that
sound alarms and allow victims to photograph thieves remotely.
The ability to know where someone or something is at all times has pro-
duced ambivalent feelings among users and requires a difficult balancing act
for policy makers as technology races ahead of social norms and the legal sys-
tem. On the one hand, gps creates a multitude of powerful tools for efficiency,
safety, convenience, and profit. On the other hand, people worry about the
erosion of privacy and misuse of those tools. A person tracking his own move-
ments calls it navigation. When someone else does so without his knowledge,
he calls it spying. Those doing the latter type of cell phone tracking primarily
call it one of two things—marketing or law enforcement.
gps tracking devices became big business long before the technology pro-
liferated in mobile phones. The military recognized the logistical advantages
of gps tracking from the outset. As mentioned in chapter 6, Persian Gulf War
troops radioed their coordinates to each other both to rendezvous and to avoid
fratricide. During the 1990s the military and the private sector began to use
electronic tracking devices attached to vehicles for fleet management. By 2004
the Defense Department used gps to track more than forty-seven thousand
commercial-carrier shipments of arms, ammunition, and explosives trans-
ported each year across the United States. 39 Today the Army is equipping indi-
vidual frontline infantrymen with the General Dynamics Rifleman Radio. 40