This afternoon a local PD officer knocked on my door. He asked if a 17 year old boy named Nicholas was at my home. He had been asked by a town North of us to apprehend the boy who had not come home for several days. He told me the other PD had pinged his phone and my home was the location it said he was at. He asked that I ask my two kids if they knew anything and was satisfied we had no connection. He was polite, never asked to search and thanked me for my time.
My question is, can they be that exact pinging a cell phone? Is it possible the kid was driving by at the time they pinged it?
After the officer left, thinking about it, I realized the girl across the street is 17, and attends an out of town high school that has students from the town where the missing boy is from. Probably coincidence, but you never know.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: rtquig,

Apple's "Find My Phone" is pretty accurate.

The LEO told me the kid was driving a Humvee. I would have noticed that. Kids hang out behind my house on the other side of the street that is a creek and wildlife reserve. I was wondering if they pinged him there.

Usually the ping we get is a triangulation off of cell towers in addition to a GPS ping if available. The triangulation ones are only accurate within a couple hundred yards.

Sometimes thousands of yards.

Very unreliable, particularly in any kind of neighborhood or apartment building.

Not to be confused with a legit GPS location. Those are damn near spot on.

Our lots are mostly 125' x 125'. Across the street Federal Wildlife area that goes about 1 1/2 miles to bay. No apartments nearby.

The two most recent experiences I have yielded different results. First ping we found the person deceased within a couple hundred feet from where the ping indicated. Second one showed the phone about 1000 yards from where it actually was. Been meaning to dive deeper into understanding this better since on the second use of the ping we wasted valuable time and resources searching an area where the person wasnt

^^^^^^^^^^^^
This leads me to believe the kid was hanging out in the Wildlife Reserve.

The Civil Air Patrol's National Cell Phone Forensics Team recorded it's 1,000th "find" of a lost or missing person using cell phone forensics.

I would hope that whatever they know and are doing has been shared, but you never know.

Civil Air Patrol National Forensics Team

Find my iPhone and Google location data are actually really accurate methods of checking someone’s location, but those require some level of access to the person’s account.

Cell phone pings from the provider are much less accurate. We usually get them with a result similar to “1500 feet southwest of the tower located at (Address)” and that’s all the more specific it’ll get. The distance can vary. It can generally help us with what town they’re in (we have three, one with 20k, one with 25k, and one with 80k people that butt up to each other) but beyond that it’s not very specific.

location is off for me unless i need it.

Cell phone triangulation accuracy is proportionate to the number of towers nearby. If you are in a rural area, the ping will be upwards of 1000 yards in radius. In more densely populated or commercial areas, the cell companies will likely have more towers installed, thus increasing accuracy. I’ve used cell phone pings to track the same deserter in various parts of a large city, with varying degrees of accuracy (50’ in one area to 1000 yards in another - same phone). There are also “active pings” versus “last known location” (our guy was turning his phone off for hours at a time).

My son went for a bike ride the other day and didn’t come back after a few hours. So I check his phone on my phone and it told me the the house address where he was. Which is our neighbor and his friend so I wasn’t worried. So It nails it down to a 1400 foot house on a 6000 foot lot and gave me the exact address of a residential neighborhood. Not bad. Kinda creepy actually

There are two different technologies being discussed here.

"Find a phone", or other phone tracking apps generally use GPS and are very accurate. You generally "opt in" to those services.

"Phone pinging" is done by the cellular companies. That uses the signal strength from various towers to determine your general location. The only way to "opt out" of this tracking is to shut your cellular signal off (shut off the phone, or go into airplane mode).
As I recall early on, it would take a warrant to get the info, but I believe that's been relaxed over the years.

Depending on the strength of the GPS lock (number of satellites visible to the phone) you can get accuracy to 10ft.
Telemetry from a cell tower would depend on the meme of towers, and accuracy of the equipment. Highly doubtful you can get better than 100sq feet.

This morning, talking to my neighbor I found this out:
The girl across the street knows who the boy is, but is not a friend of hers. The missing boy posted a racist comment about Freddie Gray on social media. Close to where the boy lives, there is a small housing project with a Bloods gang. The boy was getting death threats and left home. My neighbor did see a gray Humvee 2 parked in the Wildlife Reserve while walking her dog. Since she didn't know anything about the situation until asking her daughter, she just thought is was just another kid in the woods.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: rtquig,

As far as cell towers are concerned, there are a few around 1 1/2 - 2 miles west of us. to the east there are no towers as we have a 5 mile wide bay, a narrow barrier island which is a state park, then the Atlantic Ocean.

I work internet crimes and tracking phones is part of my job. The answer is “it depends.” What phone? What carrier? Is it on? Is it on WiFi? How many towers is it hitting off of? How close are the towers? What mapping software?

“Pinging” is a generic term for a whole lot of different things. It can be a GPS trace that can tell me what room of the house the phone is in. It can be a tower trace from certain carriers that can give me rough azimuth and range and multiple towers can get me within a block or two. It could be generic tower data that is basically an educated guess. There are all kinds of variables involved.

It also requires a court order to get the data and something that the carrier considers an emergency to get it back quickly.

quote:

Originally posted by copaup:
I work internet crimes and tracking phones is part of my job. The answer is “it depends.” What phone? What carrier? Is it on? Is it on WiFi? How many towers is it hitting off of? How close are the towers? What mapping software?

“Pinging” is a generic term for a whole lot of different things. It can be a GPS trace that can tell me what room of the house the phone is in. It can be a tower trace from certain carriers that can give me rough azimuth and range and multiple towers can get me within a block or two. It could be generic tower data that is basically an educated guess. There are all kinds of variables involved.

It also requires a court order to get the data and something that the carrier considers an emergency to get it back quickly.

Kind of covered what I was planning on adding. Love the TV shows that have them tapping the keyboard and bringing it right up.

Years back when Lojack first came out we were lucky to get a mile accuracy.
The early Onstar was impressive. They would fax a map pinpointing the stolen vehicle.

But that was eons ago.

In CAP we use the cell phone team to assist us in excluding areas to look

they can quickly rule out some pretty large areas and give us a much higher probability of a find in a reduced amount of time

also the data is obtained from the service providers and different provides have different quality of data that is provided - if I recall from a briefing last year Verizon has the worst data and is the least cooperative, AT&T has the most refined data and is the most cooperative

I still think its voodoo but it appears to work

My house is on the north side of the water on the corner with the travel trailer. I'm guessing the kid was across the street alongside the water were there is a small path.