American friends, read this and wonder how free you are. 
Uhm? sorry but i dont get what your getting at? yeah, google street view can be an invasion of privacy, but whatev. Like hell i care. I still do whatever i want.
uh. whatās wrong with being able to be found by your phone?
I donāt know if they haev got where I live, but if they havenāt I want to streak that day. Or mash my man bits on my car window. That would be hilarious!
Google is saving the world!
I guess, if your lost and want to stay that way it would suck. You could use this to your advantage though my feeding it to a cow.
And you in a country with CCTV everywhere. 
The police can only get the location info from a mobile phone in emergency situations. Iād prefer that they would have to get a judge to sign on rather than just submit a form to the mobile phone provider.
My phone has a privacy option to only transmit location info when I dial 911 (the emergency number) rather than all the time. If youāre concerned about being tracked by your phone you can enable the privacy option.
I donāt see this as a significant infringement of freedom.
Even prior to GPS being widely deployed in cell phones, in an emergency law enforcement could ask a cell phone provider to track your location (though less precisely) via cell phone RF signal.
everyone has the right not to use a cell phoneā¦
I donāt think it is a bid deal. I heard that cell phone companies in Canada will be required to have the capability to locate callers (similar to the US) by 2010.
I had to call 911 from a farm once and had to find the DLS land location to tell them where I was. It would be a whole lot easier if they could tell where you are calling from instead of telling them you are at āthe Northeast Quarter of Section 20, Township 52, Range 25 west of the Fourth Meridianā
I like my privacy but cell phone locating is a tool that can (and does where it is used) prevent many senseless deaths by giving rescuers essential information on a victims whereabouts to help minimize response times.
exactly. itās a very useful technology. being a firefighter iāve seen the result of a slow response from not being able to find the person because the caller didnāt know where they were. dispatch can only narrow the location down so well with crappy descriptions. but being able to track a cell phone would save so many lives.
As long as my whereabouts are accessible only to the right people, I donāt have a problem with it. The bad things happen when ill-intentioned people have my information in their hands. I donāt have a cell phone(and Iām not rarinā to get one), so this issue does not concern me as much as it may others. Although, if I ever were lost or kidnappedā¦
all technology is only good if used the right way.
I believe it has less to do with GPS and more to do with the location of the cell towers, thatās why the distances are so great. GPS can get down to a foot in accuracy, but you need line-of-sight to the satellites. Great for when someone dials 911 outside, but inside a building itās much harder. Not sure how sensitive the newer GPS units are, but we had one in a rental car about 7 years ago that actually lost the signal under trees 
What I find disturbing is not that it is possible to locate someone by their phone, but that the phone companies have a statutory duty to be able to provide the position to within a specified distance.
You buy a phone so that you can communicate with friends, family, business associates and sometimes the emergency services. You do not buy a phone for the purpose of it being possible for the police or government to trace you to within a few metres at any time.
In the UK we have had some high profile cases (e.g. the Soham murders) where mobile phone evidence has been useful for placing the suspect at the right place at the right time.
Itās the statutory duty bit that is sinister.
Fine when you have nothing to worry about. However, imagine if you were a member of a minority political group. Remember the McCarthy āwitch huntsā. One political group decides that another is āun Americanā and persecutes them. You could have legitimate and peaceful political aspirations and yet have to choose between being able to communicate by mobile phone or not being vulnerable to being tracked.
And as for rescue serices being able to find hikers etc., rescue beacons are available and used by divers, skiers and so on.
I do buy a phone for those reasons, but I think that itās absolutely fine that itās possible for police / government to trace me by a few hundred feet.
I mean, police / government people probably would never have to use something like that to find me unless Iām doing something incredibly illegal / felonious, and if I was, well, they know where I live anyway, who my relatives are, etc.
If I was ever to get stolen by a crazy grandmother Iād love to help policeman find me from my phone, I donāt carry a rescue beacon with me at all timesā¦
I donāt at all think itās bad, I think that itās pretty nice.
-Miles