Re: Google Doesn’t Know Where You Are (But It Has a Good Guess)

Winston_Smith wrote:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/google-doesnt-know-where-you-are-but-it-has-a-good-guess/?ref=technology
Google Doesn’t Know Where You Are (But It Has a Good Guess)

Users of Blackberries and many other smartphones can now push a button
and the Google mapping service will figure out more or less sort of
where they are.

Last month, I wrote a post called “One Reason We Need a Google Phone:
Free GPS. I was complaining that cellphone carriers, mainly Verizon,
are disabling the GPS navigation systems built into phones so they can
charge $10 a month for the service. I posited that a Google phone
wouldn’t have such a nasty gotcha. (Actually, in Google’s very open
model for its Android operating system, carriers and phone makers are
free to put as many gotchas as they want into phones.)

Google today is adding a feature for some smartphones that don’t have
built in GPS but can read the unique identifying number of the cell
tower they are connected to. By using this information, Google can
display a map of the general area they are in. (Google isn’t the first
to try this sort of thing.)

Google nicely tried to design the service to take into account its
limitations. When you push the button, it draws a dot at the nearest
cell tower and draws a circle around it to identify the area in which
it thinks you are. The screen will tell you the margin of error,
typically between 500 and 2000 feet.

Google sent me a Blackberry to try this out. (My cheap Times-provided
Samsung isn’t nearly smart enough to perform this trick.) A test on a
bus trip from suburban New Jersey to midtown Manhattan shows that
Google’s system can generally figure out what neighborhood you are in,
but it overestimated its own accuracy. I was often just outside its
margin of error circle. Most comically, it insisted I had arrived in
New York for the 20 minutes I was stuck in the Lincoln Tunnel. Anyway,
this is a nice modest tweak to the service that will help people who
are totally lost, but it’s not going to provide real-time driving
directions.
>

Soon your GPS phone will query other devices in the area and 'talk' to
those who have or can get information it may need. So, in the near
future your phone would have 'talked' to the bus CPU and gotten your
exact location. Your phone *could* then 'talk' to the Lincoln Tunnel
and NYPD and have the bus stopped at the end of the tunnel.

More bandwidth and frequencies are planned with much more capacity
than present. Traffic lights, embedded in the roadway, road signs,
storefronts, cars, drones, trucks, trains, planes, phones, devices
within devices; they're going to be everywhere.

These devices are extremely dangerous and represent just the opening
volley in the new battle of human enslavement.

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