Obsolete Phone Tracking Apps for Dummies

track your smartphone

In addition to being stuffed with badly-written, misleading or just plain wrong information; it's not unusual for old eHow.com content moved to Leaf Group's niche site Techwalla to be just plain obsolete. Every once in a while, we find Techwalla content that fits into more than one of those pigeonholes, a post such as the post "How to Track iPhones on Google Maps"¹ that Kurt Schanaman provided.

First off, there's the obvious fact that any so-called solution Kurt wrote back in about 2009 is now wildly obsolete. Apple's included a "find my iPhone" in all their mobile devices for years, so using the Google Maps Latitude application he cites is not only outdated, it's impossible: Google dropped the app in 2013. That, however, isn't Schanaman's only shortcoming... there's this, his opening sentence:

"The U.S. government has built a large cloud of positioning satellites into Earth's orbit, and it is this satellite system that powers the Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation network." So many misstatements... our first correction is merely a quibble: the GPS system is property of the U. S. Air Force. Second correction, there's not a "large cloud" of satellites, there are just 32 of them, total. Third correction, they're not "[in] Earth's orbit," they are orbiting the earth – if they were in Earth's orbit, they'd be Solar Positioning Satellites and the Air Force would need a lot more than thirty-some of them... After that bull, Kurt claimed that

"Since the advent of this network, cell phone manufacturers--including Apple--have included the ability to use their devices as navigation tools."

Just as point of information, the first GPS satellite was launched in 1978, before cell phone manufacturers were a gleam in their daddy's eye (our founder was using GPS in 1992, with a receiver the size of a loaf of WonderBread). Civilian usage became possible in 2000, at least seven years before the first smartphone that included geolocation capability. Idiot.

We don't know if Schanaman's "solution" using Google's Latitude app works because it doesn't exist any more, though there's plenty of information (albeit old) about it online. What we do know is that this content is obsolete and contains information that is both misleading and just plain wrong. Given that confluence of crap, we're awarding Kurt his sixth Dumbass of the Day. Idiot.

¹ The post has been deleted, and archive.org's Wayback machine never made a copy of the post. Oh, well, no loss...

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