Enhanced 911 gets them really close. Location data can also be sent from the phone to the PSAP if the PSAP is equipped to receive it. On most mobile phones, even if you turn-off the sharing of location data some devices will send it on E911 regardless of the phone setting.knotquiteawake wrote:Thats scary (Like in Big Brother is watching you kind of way). How exactly did they know he was at the Waffle House unless they had access to the GPS on the phone? Triangulating with the cell towers doesn't get you that close.
Normally, this is a good thing. Think about needing emergency services on the side of the road and not knowing what the name of the road is or the mile marker. However, privacy advocates believe that the phone user should still be able to control the location data information regardless if it is an E911 call or not.
There has been some press recently about iPhones automatically sharing location data. That was followed up by some Android and R.I.M. (Blackberry) devices also doing the same. Some applications that are loaded on these devices automatically override the user setting. Some with user consent some without.
BTW: I was doing triangulation back in the 70s and early 80s with targets located thousands of miles away. We could get within 100m sometimes even closer depending on the number of locations that were able to report azimuth information. We even used single site location by determining the angle of the signal as it bounced off the ionosphere, using simple geometry we could locate within 50m.