The Various Ways to Track the Location of a Cell Phone

ArticleWriterX | Jan 16, 2012 |

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Using Software to Spy for Cell Phones

In the last decade or so, cell phones have become an essential part of every person's life. Not only is this true for adults and teenagers but it is becoming truer and truer for even elementary school kids. Essentially, it is safe to assume that wherever a person goes the cell phone goes there as well. For this reason, cellphone trackers have become an important tool in locating lost phones as well as finding where the individual with the phone may be. A cellular tracking device can be as simple as an application on an iPhone that any parent can use to complex tracking systems that can be used only by police officers with warrants. Even within these various types, there are an even more variant number of cellphone tracking systems.

Network based Cell Location Tracking uses the service providers very own network infrastructure to locate a specific phone. This is a very subtle and noninvasive way to track a cell phone because it does not disrupt the cellphone itself. In other words, no specific item needs to be placed in the phone in order for network based cell phone tracking to work. Of course, because this type of mobile phone tracking involves an entire company and potentially millions of phones and customers, lots of legislature and government involvement goes into it. As a single individual it may not be easy to have a service simple track someone else's phone.

A handset based cellphone tracker, on the other hand, requires an installation of certain software into the specific phone itself. The tracking device is essentially a mini tower which can pick up its own signals as well as the signal around it and relay the signal strength and location to a specific home base. Of course, the huge disadvantage of this type of tracking is that it requires the user of the mobile device to comply with the installation of a small chip into their handset.

SIM-based cellular tracking is different from the above two because it uses raw radio measurements from the cellphone itself. This cellphone tracker does not use the signals of the phone itself but rather of its SIM card. A SIM card is unique to every phone in existence and stores a large majority of the cell phone's data. It also, as mentioned above, gives off and picks up its own signal. Therefore, it can serve as a tracker for the phone it resides in. Of course, one disadvantage of this tracking system is that a SIM card can generally be removed from the phone. In this case, it becomes useless as a tracker.

Hybrid tracking uses a combination of the above trackers. Essentially it combines the power of handset tracking and service tracking to determine the location of a particular cell phone. This is the newest and possibly the most effective form of cellphone tracking to date. One issue here is that not many cellphone services are allowing such cellphone tracking to take place, due to government laws and regulations.