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All cell phones have their movements tracked. The Clinton administration had it put into law in the 1990’s. They did it very fast after a woman was trapped in her car in a blizzard and they could talk to her but not find her. It would have been easy to build in a switch to turn the function on or off, but the legislation did not allow for that....

So, anytime your cell phone is on, you are being tracked.

I was actually involved in designing the reports we gave law enforcement in response to subpoenas. There were a LOT of data points, but this kind of accuracy was not one of them. If we had been trayvon’s provider, we could tell law enforcement that he was in the apartment complex at that time even if he was not making a call. The reason? His phone’s pings to the tower would tell us which tower he was near.

That’s about it. If they can track more than that in some way I was never made aware of, it wasn’t in any of the reports we generated in response to subpoenas. They were usually used to show that a person was NEAR a particular place at a particular time based on what tower he was pinging. And that data is stored for at least seven years.

If you are up to nefarious stuff, do what drug dealers do - use a prepaid phone and throw it away when you’re done with it.

It would have been easy to build in a switch to turn the function on or off, but the legislation did not allow for that.

No it wouldn't. The only way to turn it off is to turn of the phone. ANY radio signal can be triangulated and the triangulation is done from the other end, the cell towers. If your phone is on then it can be tracked. This is not new. You can track a CB or any other radio the same way. They only difference is that because there are so many cell towers it is fast and easy to track a cell phone.