Your Cellphone Tracks Your Location…

Your Cellphone Tracks Your Location…

We have said this before, but we want to say it again.  Your Cellphone Tracks Your Location….   Of course, we are not suggesting that you go places you should not go, or do things you should not do.

But just remember this, whether law enforcement should have access to the data stored in your phones, or not, is at the center of a constitutional debate right now.

NPR in an All Tech Considered article recently quoted Matt Blaze, a computer and information science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, as having said that location tracking is key to how the cell system operates: “As you move around, your phone is constantly checking to see whether the tower that it’s currently registered with is the best one, or whether there’s a better tower with a stronger signal coming in range,” he says.

Already law enforcement agencies across the nation issue subpoenas regularly for phone records.  The news recently as told us that the National Security Agency tracks the location of cellphones even though it does not collect the content of the calls.

In Massachusetts, one cellphone search in particular could present a test case for the civil liberties organizations that are challenging access to cellphone location information.  In Massachusetts, a man is accused of murdering his former girlfriend nine years ago; prosecutors want to use information they have concerning where his phone was at the time of the murder. The Massachusetts ACLU has asked the state´s high court that the evidence cannot be used because the police obtained the records using a subpoena and not a search warrant.

So our point here today is to remind all our readers that cellphone technology is still in its infancy.  Where it will go and how it will be used remains to be seen.  There is one thing we can be sure of, law enforcement will try to gain access to any information that can aid their agency in solving a crime and cellphone technology might just offer them an entirely new wealth of information.

I am Attorney Martin E. Regan, JR and these are my personal thoughts…