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Comment by rzimmerman | Hacker News Reader

GPS is one of the coolest things mankind has ever put together. I'm always amazed that his stuff was even considered in the 70s/80s.

By far the biggest misconception about GPS is that the GPS satellites somehow know where you are, or that your device transmits something to the satellite. I don't think this article does a good job of making that clear. It's kind of pandering to the paranoid. Granted, if you have a phone with a GPS receiver, it's totally possible/probable that your location is being reported through some other means (like the cell network).

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> GPS is one of the coolest things mankind has ever put together. I'm always amazed that his stuff was even considered in the 70s/80s.

Why? The 1980's were already the modern era of technology. By 1980, we had nuclear power (1956), hypersonic human flight (1959), fiber optics (1965), manned moon missions (1969), integrated microprocessors (1970), cell phones (1978), TCP/IP (1978), and satellite TV (late 1970's).

It's kinda sad that we're now going backwards on nuclear, abandoned mainstream supersonic flight altogether, only had one moon landing and still don't have a strong fiber coverage...

> By far the biggest misconception about GPS is that the GPS satellites somehow know where you are, or that your device transmits something to the satellite.

I didn't think that was a common misconception, but then, in the article:

>> The military immediately — finally — [realized the spying benefits of GPS].

The bracketed piece is a link to http://www.army.mil/article/7457/gps-goes-to-war---the-globa... which talks about the military using GPS for straight forward positioning, not a word about spying.

That's really shoddy writing.

Yeah, really bad. The "unwanted" strikes me as completely unjustified: that it had to compete for extremely scarce post-Vietnam War '70s defense dollars is hardly remarkable, and there seems to be little excuse, the author's bio says he's "been reporting, reviewing and ranting about consumer electronics for 30 years", which should make him about my age, i.e. if wasn't politically etc. aware in part of the '70s, they were very recent history. Even the time line as quoted in the work is inconsistent:

"By the early 1970s, several competing GPS ideas emerged, and the battling projects caused military paralysis until a serendipitous four-hour weekend meeting in November 1972...."

Now, maybe it's just because I definately lived through that period, but I kinda thought 1972 was part of "the early 1970s".... Very sloppy writing.

In the tin-foil-beanie community, it's not quite as common a belief as chemtrails, but more so than the deep-underground-military-base meme.

If you have a phone in your pocket your location is already known within a certain bound of error because the cells can triangulate you, for that you don't even need a smartphone with GPS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_tracking

If you don't want to be tracked, don't carry a transmitter in your pocket.

Since we're in a thread about GPS, I don't think it's too pedantic to point out that GPS and cellular tower positioning use trilateration and multilateration respectively rather than triangulation.

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