Track Anyone With a Cell

Give someone this cheap prepaid cellphone to see where they are in real time

By Ethan Todras-Whitehill Posted 04.14.2006 at 1:00 am 7 Comments

celltrack_485.jpg

Track Anyone With a Cell

Cost: $100
Time: 4 Hours
Easy | | | | | Hard
Cue the Mission Impossible theme. I´m working a top-secret operation, and my support team is monitoring my every movement. OK, so I´m just going to the hardware store, but my girlfriend, Jen, is tracking me. Using a $100 kit from Mologogo (with a $6-a-month data plan), I´ve turned a prepaid cellphone into a GPS tracking device. Every few minutes, the phone transmits my location within 100 meters to mologogo.com, which posts it to a Google map that Jen can access from any computer. She can view my most recent spot or my past 100 recorded locations as little pushpins stamped with date and time.

The key to this project is the government´s Enhanced 911 program, which will soon require all cellphones to transmit a GPS signal so that police can locate callers in need. So far, only Nextel, Boost Mobile and BlackBerry allow third-party companies to build software that uses that signal, but other carriers will follow suit this year.

Since Mologogo launched in October, its 1,000-plus members have found plenty of uses for it: following marathon runners, keeping track of the kids, planting a phone in the car in case it´s stolen, watching a boyfriend´s every move . . . Uh-oh.

Go to mologogo.com and order a starter kit, which includes a phone preloaded with the tracking application, as well as two chargers, a USB cable and $10 in prepaid credit-nearly enough for the first two months of data service. Activate the phone following the included instructions. Make sure you choose the Mobile Data plan.
Create two accounts at mologogo
.com, one for the phone and one for the person tracking it. In each account, add the other as a â€friend.â€
Set up the Mologogo software on your phone at Main Menu> Java> Apps> More> Mologogo. Enter the account information you got from the Mologogo site.
Give the phone to someone. Sign on to the site and see where they are.

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7 Comments

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edcarter03

02/15/08 at 2:56 pm

Privacy anyone?

I guess this is good for hikers and people of the sort, but I don't want anyone knowing where I am and what I'm doing at all times, especially not the government. Its not like this can't be done already, but at least they have to work for it a little bit.

You should have included this in your Anonymity Experiment.

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SpunkyBuggy16

05/08/08 at 10:11 am

Well, it won't be just anyone who knows where you are, just the other person with the account who is friends with you.

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Moshable Music

07/16/08 at 6:09 pm

I read in a magazine about 5 years back that a company in europe designed a game people played on their phones. It was basically tag using the gps features. Your phone beeped when another player got within your range and you got various weapons defensive stuff that would affect that range. Then you had to catch them or get so close to them to score points. Their phone would beep to so that signaled the chase off. The europeans are way ahead of us as far as cell phone technology but I look forward to some of the sweet games that can come from it.

Moshable Music

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