For Liars and Loafers, Cellphones Offer an Alibi

Bill Stewart bill.stewart at pobox.com
Sun Jun 27 13:21:46 PDT 2004


At 01:13 PM 6/27/2004, Jack Lloyd wrote:
>On Sun, Jun 27, 2004 at 01:01:53PM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
> > Do any of them let _you_ see the GPS results (which would be useful),
> > or are they only available to Big Brother and maybe advertisers?
>
>Not as far as I know. The cheaper ones certainly don't,
>it's possible the more expensive ($300+) models do allow this
>but I have seen nothing advertising such a feature.

Sigh.  It probably doesn't even cost them anything -
it's just another user interface menu item.
(I suppose that's not strictly true - if I were trying to build
a GPS Big Brother feature into cellphones for minimum cost,
I guess I'd probably look at having the phone just take
satellite readings and forward them to a central site for calculations,
to avoid having to put any extra computing support into the machine.
Don't know if that's a win or loss cost-wise.)


>I think the best bet for something like that is to get a Treo (which don't 
>have
>GPS built in), then get a GPS card for it.

I've already got a GPS, but I seldom carry it around
unless I'm camping - it's old, so it's too clunky.





More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list