lairdb@crash.cts.com (Laird P. Broadfield) (01/11/91)
In <15879@accuvax.nwu.edu> forrette@cory.berkeley.edu (Steve Forrette) writes: > - Before someone else brings this up, here's something that came to >mind that I don't think is a big deal, but I just know some will: >"privacy." Now, someone always knows what city I'm in if I bring my >cellphone along. Note that unlike the *18/*19 FMR of the "B" >carriers, this new referral service happens automatically when you >place your first call, and there's apparently no way to shut it off >(except to leave call forwarding on before you leave (once they get it >working properly, that is!), but then you have to pay their "No >Vaseline" full airtime prices for forwarded calls :=( ) Actually, I had a thought a while back, when I was chatting with an out- of-town friend who works for (a B carrier.) We were chatting about all of the smarts that's going on behind the scenes vis-a-vis signal strength, cell handoff, software based "hysteriesis" to avoid back-and-forth of calls at nearly equal strength, and so forth, when I realized that it should be fairly trivial to derive location information from all this. Not only that, you don't have to even go off-hook, the switch can bang your phone with an interrogate packet without you ever noticing. Seemed to us that this made perfect sense, and his intuition said that a 100-yard radius of uncertainty was a reasonable guess, assuming some foreknowlege of signal propagation characteristics in the particular area. "Ha ha, forget what _city_ you're in, we know what _room_ you're in!!" Does this theory fall apart anywhere? (P.S. Can somebody mail me with the mfr. and model of the handheld that has a _vibrate_ ringer? None of the local outlets seem to have heard about it.) Laird P. Broadfield UUCP: {akgua, sdcsvax, nosc}!crash!lairdb INET: lairdb@crash.cts.com