Police use GPS, Google Maps to locate missing girl

Massachusetts police used cell phone tracing via GPS and Google Maps to track down a 9-year-old girl who was allegedly kidnapped by her grandmother, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported on Wednesday.

Police arrested the 52-year-old grandmother at a motel in Natural Bridge, Va., on Tuesday after she allegedly failed to return her granddaughter to the home of her legal guardians in Athol, Mass., the report said. The grandmother had picked up the child for a weekend visit on Saturday and allegedly threatened to not return her, according to the report.

With help from the cell phone provider, authorities were able to trace the location of the child's cell phone and followed the journey of the grandmother and granddaughter by using GPS coordinates that updated every time the phone was used.

They were able to track the phone to an intersection on Virginia Route 11 in Natural Bridge and then used Google Street View to view the intersection, where they saw a building with a red roof that looked like a motel. Then they searched on Google maps for motels in the town and located the Budget Inn-Natural Bridge and confirmed the location using Google's satellite view on the map, the report said.

The case is "an interesting first (at least as far as we're aware)," Pablo Chavez, Google senior policy counsel, wrote in a blog post.

The Google Street View of the Virginia motel where a missing Massachusetts girl was found with her grandmother.

(Credit: Google)

[Pete Bardo]

Interesting... I'm turning off my cell phone now.

[t8]

Coz you do bad things?

[Dalkorian]

You think turning it off does any good? Hmm.

[Lakebook]

You have to take of the battery since they can locate you even with the cell phone turned off.

[tech_crazy]

If the phone is off, it is off - no transmission/reception. Nobody can track. The last cell(s) the phone communicated with is the most that can be traced.

[servermaker]

do you have tin foil on your head?

[humanssssss]

Cell phone now has internal battery that emits signal even if u take the battery out. The signal may be weak but it can be tracked with strong enough transmitter to detect.

[Draq Wraith]

Receivers do the tracking not transmitters fyi transmitters just tell the phone to ping.

[SeizeCTRL]

Crazy stuff... I live about 30 minutes from there. My old phone had the option of disabling the GPS in it, but my new one does not appear to have that in the main menu. Next time I go in to the 'you're not a tech and shouldn't be in here' menus, I will look for a GPS on/off option.

[Jack K1]

Lakebook is poorly informed.

[roland827]

He probably was watching the movie "Eagle Eye" where they claimed that the only way they won't be able to track you on your phone was by taking the battery out. It can only be true if cellphones were designed to send signals even when off... and basically that would just make the battery life for cellphone worse...

[commsoft]

Just wait until Google starts getting subpoenas from divorce lawyers to prove where people were on a certain evening.

Remember that when you use an iPhone and use Google maps, etc., or other similar systems, Google can record and store where you are and given their other data collection practices, it seems very likely they're keeping all of this info.

[Pishkado]

Cell phone records are already commonly used in that sort of situation to prove where someone was (or wasn't). So are transponder records from highway toll booths, ATM use records, credit card data and assorted other things.

[morlamweb]

People, this is the E991 system in action. It's the system that we all pay for, via E911 service surcharges on our monthly bills. It's a federal law that mandates the use of GPS technology to reliably pinpoint a cellphone caller in case of emergencies - like a kidnapping. The GPS tracking features can be turned off on most phones, and if you're truly paranoid you could simply turn the phone off. I'm also truly saddened to the number of people who still believe in the ol' "cell phone can be tracked by battery" myth. I thought people were more skeptical that that!

[ppgreat]

They tried to use MS Search but all it showed was a picture of Ballmer at CES.

[yevnod]

technology put to good use