mobile phone tracking

I wonder about that. Mobile phones are constantly contacting servers, but are there any records of that? I don't know, and I can imagine it being either way. In any case, they would check her account, and the smashed phone would only give them some idea which carrier to contact.

speirbhean said:

Hi all, haven't posted here in ages but would love some help with this please. Writing a thriller in which my main character has been found dead in an apartment. No one knows how she got there or why she went there. Her mobile phone, an iphone is beside her smashed to pieces.
Would an investigator be able to track her movements from the smashed phone? I know you can track her movements if she has synched her phone with her computer but in this case she went out for an evening and hasn't been home since so she has not synched her computer. So basically she went out with her phone and her body is found a week later, phone smashed up beside it. What can be done technologically to trace her movements?
thanks in advance...

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If you want her movements to be traced, then yes. This article details how the iPhone OS was saving geolocation data, storing as much as a year's worth of information.

Apple has released an update to the iPhone's OS that allows the user to turn that 'feature' off, but location services need to be turned off. Generally, if you enable e-911 features on your phone, it will transmit your geolocation along with your 911 call.

The short answer is yes, the movements (of the phone) can be tracked. If you're looking for specific tech explanations you'll run into a host of issues, some of which are legal in nature, but all can be frustrating. Most of the tech is proprietary and patent protected. Some of the capabilities are classified (govt sanction). However, since you're writing fiction, you can proffer whatever plausible tech you can imagine.

Using the phone's data is possible and the link about the iPhone accidentally storing location data for long periods is a good one to use.

But, don't fall into the trap that some super secret government agency can punch a few buttons on a computer and locate your cell phone when you're not using it like they do on TV. Yes, it is technically possible to find the phone, approximately, using the e911 stuff and the GPS in the phone, etc, but it's not something that can happen remotely with a push of a button without a heck of a lot of setup ahead of time.

Hallen said:

Using the phone's data is possible and the link about the iPhone accidentally storing location data for long periods is a good one to use.

But, don't fall into the trap that some super secret government agency can punch a few buttons on a computer and locate your cell phone when you're not using it like they do on TV. Yes, it is technically possible to find the phone, approximately, using the e911 stuff and the GPS in the phone, etc, but it's not something that can happen remotely with a push of a button without a heck of a lot of setup ahead of time.

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This. If it's your average police force they will definitely be able to do it, but it'll involve the cooperation of the phone company, usually via their subpoena compliance department. Most likely the detective will work with the local prosecutors to get a grand jury subpoena (or equivalent) to obtain the data and all other cell phone records.

Hallen said:

But, don't fall into the trap that some super secret government agency can punch a few buttons on a computer and locate your cell phone when you're not using it like they do on TV. Yes, it is technically possible to find the phone, approximately, using the e911 stuff and the GPS in the phone, etc, but it's not something that can happen remotely with a push of a button without a heck of a lot of setup ahead of time.

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MarkEsq said:

This. If it's your average police force they will definitely be able to do it, but it'll involve the cooperation of the phone company, usually via their subpoena compliance department. Most likely the detective will work with the local prosecutors to get a grand jury subpoena (or equivalent) to obtain the data and all other cell phone records.

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Actually, sometimes it is in fact just that easy.

> If it's your average police force they will definitely
> be able to do it, but it'll involve the cooperation of
> the phone company {...}

Phone companies don't store geolocation. They only provide it on demand, either from a phone app or from calling 911. So the police might not get any useful information at all.

> Would an investigator be able to track her movements
> from the smashed phone?

The only viable way for this to work would be if the victim was playing a location-based game. Then that game server might have recorded geolocation data points at regular intervals for which the police can subpoena for access.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location-based_game

-cb

Nah, any smartphone will have a cache of recent approximate locations. The locations of nearby cell towers, actually, used to triangulate your position for use with assisted GPS. For the iPhone, these are stored in a standard sqlite database in /private/var/root/Library/Caches/locationd/consolidated.db. The recent fiasco was due to the database growing too large, thereby storing too many locations, and it was also part of the computer backup. The 4.3 update fixed that, so the locations aren't backed up to the computer anymore, and the size of the cache was reduced. It'll still be on the phone, though, and will have recent locations (well, locations of the nearest cell towers to you, anyway).

Here is a guide to visualizing the locations once you have the consolidated.db file. The only problem is grabbing it off the smashed-up phone. Since she's dead, will they really need permission? I'm not sure. Anyway, if the flash drive is still intact, it would be a matter of grabbing the file off the flash drive. Since you need to jailbreak an intact iPhone to browse its filesystem, I'm not sure how that would work if you just have the drive, but I doubt it would be difficult for a forensics team working with the investigator. If the investigator himself is tech savvy enough, he could take the drive, open up a working iPhone, and put it in, but that would be pretty difficult for your average person with the way they're constructed. If the drive itself is damaged, it may still be possible to get the data, but it would definitely require forensic tools. If she encrypted the phone with a 4-digit passcode, can break the encryption, but they'll have to purchase expensive software and it'll take a while. If she encrypted the phone with an alphanumeric passcode, they probably don't stand a chance.

The locations are only approximate, since they indicate the cell towers, not your actual location, so to get a more accurate idea of where she might have been, the forensics team could look at the time stamps of the various locations and for any that are close enough together in time, use them to triangulate her real position. However, the time stamps only indicate the most recent time when a certain cell tower was used, so if she went to the same place more than once, they'd have no way of knowing.

In addition, any photos taken will have been geotagged with her real location, so if she took any photos, the investigator can use those, too. As mentioned earlier, the carrier also stores all their own location info, which will always require legal legwork.

> The locations of nearby cell towers, actually, used to
> triangulate your position for use with assisted GPS.

That's the barebones information a cellphone can get (handset-based positionning). It can't compute the position correctly because the information lacks how the signal strenght is affected by the surrounding buildings.

But an LBS service provider (network-based positionning) works hand-in-hand with the cellphone operators into providing more accurate positional information - by cross-referencing signal strenghts against a map of known signal coverage in urban areas, for example.


In terms of storytelling, it could be that the victim had the phone running the latest "Spy Hunter" game in the background until it got smashed. The police then finds the game subscription billing and can subpoena "Super Spy Game Company" for the victim's game account information, which happens to contain the latest game round's position info.

-cb

cbenoi1 said:

That's the barebones information a cellphone can get (handset-based positionning). It can't compute the position correctly because the information lacks how the signal strenght is affected by the surrounding buildings.

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Not that it'll impact the situation in the story much, but that's not entirely accurate. If it's an iPhone (or any smartphone really), then it has GPS. It only needs an approximation so it can get a GPS lock quicker. You don't need to be playing a game for the phone to know exactly where you are.

> You don't need to be playing a game for the phone to know
> exactly where you are.

There has to be a running application that polls for position information. And that information better be somewhere else than on the phone if the phone get smashed to bits. An LBS-based game comes as a natural choice - the game server needs positional information from all the players in order to run the service. Just running the Compass application won't store anything anywhere.

-cb

most modern smart phones (iphones/androids) have built in gps so can be tracked fairly easily - the provider can usually trace the last known locations too, so if it was smashed after she got to the apartment, then they'll be able to locate her using gps.

Even when you think you've turned it off - it can still tell if I'm at home or elsewhere (just try posting to google+ from one with your gps settings off & see how fast it tells you - usually pretty accurately - where you are!!!)

there is also a service you can get where you get a gps tracker added to the battery compartment... some of our field engineers have that at work for when they're on a 3am outage because they don't get fancy smart phones. It's usually traced from an office using a password & shows it on a GIS system. depending on what your MC/victim did for a living, that might be an option if the phone is going to get mangled before she gets to the apartment.

I still want to know how it was smashed to pieces. Just because the phone was smashed to pieces doesn't mean everything inside it was smashed to pieces. The onboard storage is pretty small, and isn't about to be harmed by sudden movement like a HDD would be, so there's a high probability it'd be okay.

Given "mobile", I'm guessing you are in the UK?

Yes, you can figure out where someone was provided their phone was turned on based on what masts it has talked to. Given that this is a murder case, they should be able to get hold of the information. It's one of the pieces of evidence used to convict the Soham murderer. That was a decade ago, so it can't have required the absolute latest technology.

I know nothing about this website except that it came up when I looked for reminders of what I'd half remembered about the location of a mobile being significant in the case, but it might be useful...

http://www.afentis.com/forensic-science-articles/cell-site-analysis

I can't see that whether the phone was destroyed would make any difference to this.

Smashing to pieces will not erase the information. Fire might, magnetism or electric pulse will probably erase the information.

As for switching off your phone, if you don't put it on 'airline', where it won't send or receive, the phone will keep sending out queries to triangulate its position. So the best way to avoid being triangulated is to switch off your phone AND remove the battery. I'm not that paranoid, but a criminal might be.

speirbhean said:

Sorry, was away for a while. I'm in Ireland. Actually my victim would have been on line on an Internet forum a few hours before death and again just before. Would the site mods know where she was via ip address? She was using a pub wifi

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The info may or may not be outdated (according to my IP address, my apartment is still a meat business or something on the other side of town), but even then it should give them a very good idea in an instant from the publicly available info. Given a warrant or court order or whatever, they'd be able to track down where she was exactly from the ISP.