Locating people by cell phone

[patric]

It's no secret your location can be found on a map if you carry a cell phone, either by triangulating your signal among cell towers or by the GPS information that many newer phones transmit.
Like any technology, it has the potential for great good or horrendous abuse.

Look what happened when police were searching for an elderly man, and tried to locate his cell phone:

      A 62-year-old Carrollton area man was found unconscious and unresponsive Thursday morning during an intense search overnight by Carroll County sheriff deputies, an Ohio State Highway Patrol trooper and the patrol's airplane.

      Two K-9 units, several fire departments and 100 individuals on foot also were involved in the search for the man, who Sheriff Dale Williams said fled his residence on Kensington Rd. after a domestic disturbance call to deputies...

      Williams said he attempted to use the man's cell phone signal to locate him, but the man was behind on his phone bill and the Verizon operator refused to connect the signal unless the sheriff's department agreed to pay the overdue bill. After some disagreement, Williams agreed to pay $20 on the phone bill in order to find the man. But deputies discovered the man just as Williams was preparing to make arrangements for the payment. 

[Conan71]

Wow, there's some nice PR for Verizon!

[waterboy]

Probably a call center employee here in Tulsa. I can see their motto on a poster above his desk, "Pay or Die".

[Conan71]

Probably a call center employee here in Tulsa. I can see their motto on a poster above his desk, "Pay or Die".

Hah, hah, hah!  That's a truckload of hillarity.  Thanks for the laugh WB!

[rhymnrzn]

It's like in the movie 12 Monkeys, where they located people by holding cell.

"VOLUNTEER DUTY!"

"I didn't volunteer."

"You causing trouble again?"

"No. No trouble."