Cell phone technology, mobile applications and social networks make a powerful combination for tracking people. Ironically, most of the people being tracked do so willingly through their own use of these technologies.

Google’s announced that it will offer turn-by-turn navigation to users of the Motorola Droid, showing the precision with which cell phones are now able to pinpoint a person’s location.

Prosecutors can now use cell phone GPS records to prove a defendant has been near the location of a crime scene. Divorce lawyers have used cell phone records to prove a spouse has been cheating. Services like Loopt and Google Latitude allow people to find the current locations of friends and family in their networks.

Although these mobile people tracking services can be handy for users, they can also be abused by people with bad intentions.

Last June, an Arizona man claimed that hist Twitter posts he made while on vacation may have helped a robber who stole expensive video equipment from his home.

Services like Loopt let people share their locations online with other approved devices. Loopt provides safety and privacy tips to users, but the decision of how much personal information to reveal is up to individual users.

Private investigators and attorneys are now frequently using phone records to prove guilt in both civil and criminal court cases.

A 1999 FCC law required all cell phones to come equipped with GPS technology by 2005 to assist with emergency calls.

Some phones still rely on satellites for tracking, which makes them less accurate than other navigation tools such as a Garmin, which can find its location within a few meters. Environmental conditions can also limit the accuracy of tracking devices, like cloudy weather or being indoors.

However, mobile technology will only more precise and potentially invasive in the future.

Source: CNBC.com

The Flickr photo sharing network has introduced a new people tagging tool that allows users to find a person in pictures by name.

Flickr has also improved their privacy settings, so people can opt out of being identified in pictures. How effective Flickr will be at implementing these new privacy controls is anyone’s guess.

The new people tagging tool lets you identify individual people in photos by drawing boxes around their faces. Flickr then lets you identify each person by name. If the person is a registered member on Flickr, the tagging system suggests the member’s name to you as you type the tag.

Once a person is tagged, finding them in searches is easier. Flickr will now be able to show you where the person is located inside the pictures, which is really helpful in searching group shots.

Flickr currently reports over 40 million registered users on its service.

People-tagging technology is already available on other picture-sharing networks like Google’s Picasa and Facebook.

Flickr’s people search tool isn’t as advanced as Picasa. Google launched its people search tool for pictures in 2008 and upgraded its search last month.

However, Flickr’s people-tagging and search allows more privacy controls for users by allowing them to opt out of being identified in pictures. People who are not members of Flickr can also be tagged in pictures, but they will need to approve the ID before it appears in Flickr’s system.

Whereas on Facebook people often get tagged in an unflattering picture that they didn’t approve of. Once a person is tagged in a Facebook photo, that picture along with your name gets tied to your Facebook profile. The tagged picture then will appear in Facebook image searches, whether you want it to or not.

People who want to monitor the tagging activity associated with their name can review their Recent Activity page. Every time they’re tagged in a photo, there will be a notice in on their Recent Activity feed informing them as to who tagged them, and showing a link to the tagged photo.

Source: Web Monkey

Google Earth is being used with CCTV video to view people and vehicles in real time by students from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The potential and possible use of this new search technology will be viewed with excitement by some people and fear by others.

Right now the technology makes the people and vehicles anonymous and virtual; but the future of this technology along with the proliferation of CCTV cameras and RFID tagging technology could make for an advanced people search and car tracking system.

You can watch a video of this new search and tracking technology below:

Source: Gizmodo.com

Here is a great mother and daughter reunion story that shows how online people search efforts can reunite a mother with her long lost daughter after almost 40 years —

A woman whose kids were taken from her by the East German Stasi secret police was recently reunited with one of them after nearly 4 decades.

Petra Hoffmann, now 55 years old, was reunited this week with her daughter Mandy Reinhardt, now 38 years old, for the first time since the East German Communist police seized her after she was born.

Mandy was born in 1971. Her father was a political dissident who had served prison time for speaking against life under the rule of Communist East Germany.

“The Youth Welfare people came to my door one day, said I was not a fit person to be a mother,” said Mrs Hoffmann.

“They put me and her into a home. Days later, against my will, Mandy was given up for adoption.”

After the Berlin wall fell she began the hunt for her children.

She hounded government authorities, put notices in newspapers, asked for help from old friends. But the Communist police had destroyed most of the paperwork and her search went nowhere.

However, six weeks ago, a letter came from Berlin to Petra which read: “You don’t know me at all, but I believe you are my mother.” Mandy had been searching for her mother since 1992 after her foster parents she was given to informed her that she was adopted.

Mandy had searched for her mother on the internet and wrote to government authorities for help, but ultimately found a plea that her mother had posted on a website, which led to the communication and recent reunion between the two.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk

If you’ve been online for any amount of time, if you know your way around the Internet and are generally aware of how the system works, if you have established your online presence and left your mark behind, you would definitely be guilty of doing a vanity search at some point of time. And if you haven’t, well, all I can say is that you’re missing out on one of the simple and unexpected pleasures that the Internet offers.

A vanity search on Google or any other search engine throws up the names of sites that feature your name on the net – on online networking sites, as bylines if you’ve written articles or have your own blog, and elsewhere too. Of course, if you share the name of a celebrity, then you’re out of luck because you have to provide more detailed search terms if you want to filter your name from the millions of hits that a celebrity’s name is bound to return.

They’re called vanity searches, but very often, they help do much more than just feed your ego. When you search for your name online, you can see what others are saying about you, or if they’re talking about you at all. Sometimes the latter may turn out to be a blessing in disguise, because, as the saying goes, no news is akin to good news.

If people are talking about you, you better hope that it’s all good, because when it’s not flattering, you don’t have much of a chance at either retribution or rebuttal.

Because of the cloak of anonymity that it offers, the Internet is a place where you can slander people’s good names and more often than not, get away with it. So unless you wish and are prepared to see the matter through, to go to court and procure an order that forces service providers and web hosts to reveal the identity of the people who dragged your good name through the mud, you’re most likely left with no satisfactory course of retaliation.

Even otherwise, it’s good to keep track of what people are saying about you, especially if you tend to live life in the limelight and if your actions and people’s perception of them could cause inconveniences or hindrances in your life. A word of caution though – don’t take every random mention of your name to heart, whether good or bad. It’s just not worth it, not when there’s bound to be something new in a few days.

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This guest article was written by Adrienne Carlson, who regularly writes on the topic of forensic scientist schools. Adrienne welcomes your comments and questions at her email address: adrienne.carlson83@yahoo.com.