There is little doubt that the use of GPS for navigation purposes is a huge industry. That was, after all, one of the initial impetus behind the Department of Defense creating the satellite system. They wanted a way to know where they assets were but they also wanted to us it to tell where there assets were going. GPS navigation has become the norm in many families across America with Garmins or TomToms or Magellans replacing the friendly AAA triptiks of two decades ago. I still remember as a child going into the AAA office with my mother to get a triptik ready for a family vacation. Now, you just enter your trip into the GPS and it does all the routing for you. Cell phone companies realized that this was a huge market and that their technology could easily break into it. They could either us GPS technology to do the mapping just like a Garmin can, or they could leverage the cellular signals they were already broadcasting to create new navigation systems. Some companies decided to go with GPS and other stuck with the cell signal. Either way you look at, cell phones now use GPS or a GPS-like technology to give turn-by-turn directions to drivers all over the country. While this isn’t GPS tracking as most would think of it, it still is using a cellular phone to track and record position information. It can tell people how to fast you are traveling, an ETA (estimated time of arrival), and it can actively tell you your current location. This is GPS tracking if you ask me. As we will see this information can be used for other purposes other than navigation.
Location monitoring is another useful application of GPS in cell phones. Unlike the type of tracking that goes on for navigation purposes, the information used to track the location of a cell phone is actaully transmitted from the cell phone back to the cell company. This process is often referred to as