Developers Can Now Access Locations of 250 Million Phones Across U.S. Carriers | Hacker News Reader

Developers Can Now Access Locations of 250 Million Phones Across U.S. Carriers

readwriteweb.com

30 pointsbengross13 comments

Don't get worried about privacy, in order to locate a phone a potential user of your location based service first has to create an account at http://www.veriplace.com/ Then respond to to an SMS to the phone number to opt in.

As a developer you then have to have your application approved and only then do you have the privilege of using their 5 step process to try to get a phone's location

http://developer.veriplace.com/devportal/developerguide

A cell tower location will cost you around .02 and an attempt at a more accurate will cost around .05

I'm looking through all this, and one question comes to mind: you iphone users know when an app first asks if it can access your location data? Well, I'm thinking here: Does that mean it can access your location data even when you're not using that app?

In the age of multitasking, I'm not sure that "when you're not using the app" is even defined. But yeah, it looks like this service can get your location even if you haven't installed an app at all.

It very much sounds like the carriers are selling out their customers location data.

My first thought when I read about this was how the hell do I opt out. I'm guessing you won't be able to until the carriers are inevitably sued.

The company says the service is opt in this press release: http://www.location-labs.com/press_article.php?newsid=80 and in the comments here: http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/21/location-labs/ and here: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/is_geofencing_the_next_...

Although, I have to say this is not at all clear (at least to me) from reading through their website or even by reading their privacy policy http://location-labs.com/privacy.php

This article seems to resemble PR copypasta, but over-looking that, it is a little comforting that the thing is opt-in.

That kind of sheds doubt on the 250M figure, though. Do they mean 250M potential users?

Exactly - 250M potential users is what they mean. Right now they probably have very few consumer opt-ins.

Yes, it's 100% opt in.

Not a word about opt-in vs. opt-out. Privacy, schmivacy?

Reading the developer section of the company website, I understand it's opt-in (per app).

It is 100% opt-in, but there is no "app" needed on the actual phone - so you're totally right if by "per app" you mean "per developer" or "per use case." So I might allow one company to locate my phone for a family-finder scenario, and another company to locate my phone for local weather alerts, for example. No app required in either case. Hope this helps.

Anyone have an idea about how they are getting the location data? Tower triangulation?

Their contracts with the carriers allow for remote pings of the GPS chip (if there is GPS on the handset). Otherwise it's just cell tower triangulation.

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