February 1, 2006
How I stalked my girlfriend
Ben Goldacre for The Guardian explains in a very entertaining article, how he tracked his girlfriend's whereabouts for a full week through her mobile phone.
"First, though, I ought to point out, that my girlfriend is a journalist, that I had her permission. Getting old of her phone I took it upstairs to register it on a website I had been told about (the Guardian, rather sensibly, doesn't want me to tell you any more than that.)
I have no such scruples, my guess is that he used World Tracker.
"Signing up, deleting the text messages requesting confirmation, even following a person-shaped blob (his girlfriend) in the middle on an online map left no trace in her cell phone."
Ben set up the website to track her at regular intervals, "taking a snapshot of her whereabouts automatically, every half hour, and plotting her path on the map, so that he could view it at his leisure."
The moral of the story is not to leave your phone out of your sight! In just 5 minutes, anyone, any company could set this up and track you.
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