Website can find your exact location with your phone number

[Hum]

A good reason to not give out your number on the Internet:

 

Your smartphone always knows where you are. And thanks to the Life360.com service, powered by technology from a company called Loc-Aid, a parent can locate a child by her phone number or even an elderly parent who has wandered away from home.

Indeed, network location services can save lives, protect children, and enable business services -- and they're available to anyone.

Thanks to a free online demo at Loc-Aid.com, you can type in the cellphone number of anyone in the U.S. and find their precise location in just a few seconds.

Agreements with wireless carriers like T-Mobile and Sprint let Loc-Aid triangulate position using cellular towers and the GPS signal on your phone. In urban areas, the results are more precise than rural areas where there are fewer cell towers.

But after validating a phone, Locaid doesn't require the user to be involved. Banks and marketers can search for the location of someone who opts-in to the service at any time.

?App developers can use mobile network location for things like validating legitimate credit card purchases and detecting fraud ... or tracking assets like laptops or street-cleaners or dumpsters,? explained Carolyn Hodge, a spokeswoman for the Loc-Aid service.

Swatton says location tracking tools are used mostly for legitimate purposes, but warns that apps powered by Loc-Aid could be used for criminal activity -- if a hacker figured out how to bypass security precautions. For example, a hacker could set up a server that captures your location information after Locaid is disabled.

Rob Enderle, an analyst with Enderle Group, said new location-finding services can be abused (like any other service), but that does not mean they should be outlawed. Enderle advises people to be careful about how they use the tools and to disable features you do not need.

 

Locaid adds several safeguards to make sure its tools are tamper resistant. For example, once you find someone, the service turns off after 15 minutes to prevent someone from tracking you all day. :ninja:

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