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Comment by warrenm | Hacker News Reader

The phone companies already do this, more or less, as is shown in court cases where cell phone records are brought in as evidence

A decade ago that data was a little more iffy (i.e. it was more a good estimate (typically within half a mile or less) than a true location), but with a combination of more towers (and therefore more data points), the ubiquity of smartphones (which check in more often, are doing geolocation related things, etc), and better / more accessible/well-known analytics tools, is think even 6 months would be a generous time-frame

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> The phone companies already do this, more or less, as is shown in court cases where cell phone records are brought in as evidence

You can also arrange to buy this information. I worked for a place where you could request someone's location by phone number. There were a lot of contractual obligations around us having the phone owner "allow" us to do that, but no technical ones.

Yep this is more than possible. It's done in marketing. If you have a short code to "text for coupons" There's a high chance that they're doing a ping against your number.

How did you access the data? Via a simple REST api?

> How did you access the data?

We signed a contract, fulfulled our obligations, and paid them money

> Via a simple REST api?

I really don't remember. It might have been SOAP or something. It was an HTTP-based API, but I don't think it was REST specifically.

There was also a 30s or so delay from request to when we'd get the location back.

Interesting, thanks!

Was it a phone operator specific system? Like could you get the location of any phone number or only AT&T's, for example.

I believe our provider had contracts with the big 4 in the US.

What's the accuracy on that location information? Is it down to the meter/10 meter/100 meter?

It wasn't GPS accurate, but accurate enough for our usage (monitoring volunteers). I want to say it was under 10m and over 5m on average. It's been about 6 years since I've dealt with the system, so the details are a bit fuzzy.

repo men usually have someone able to do this for $50-200

Here's one such testimony from Aaron Hernandez's murder trial, where his cell phone pinged a tower near the scene of the crime:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Am8izKu5ZSU

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Hernandez#2013_murder_of...

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