Can Regular GPS Track Where Someone’s Been?

Frequent visitors here know that I pay close attention to what people are searching for … a great tool that helps me know when people type something into a search engine and then land here is: www.103bees.com … a web site and little code snippet that you add to pages you want to watch that tells you the search query that brought someone to a site … and a whole lot more. recommended.

Anyway, that’s where the title of this post comes from. In recent times quite a few people have searched on that question, and, for those of us in the GPS business world the immediate reaction would be to say “no”. But that reaction would be wrong. Depending on what the reader really meant by “regular” GPS the answer should be, almost assuredly any GPS will show your trips … in some way and for some length of time.

Of course I am assuming that by “regular” the curious party means something like a handheld hiking/biking/exploring tool that you’ll buy at the sporting goods store, rather that a dedicated system a business would buy for a big ROI on their transportation costs. But nearly every FPS device I have examines has some memory functions .. in the cheaper, simpler consumer grade units these functions may be hidden from the consumer …. but they are often there….

Years ago, back when the Earth was still cooling and electronic calculators had just hit the market I determined I was going to buy one, as soon as the price for a simple, four-function box dropped below $100. One day I opened the local paper (there _was_ no Internet, kiddies) and low and behold, that paragon of technology, Sears, was having a sale. The cheapest “four-banger” was about $70 and you could also by models that featured an inverse key (1/n), a one button squaring key, and, for about $120, the same basic calculator enhanced to give you a one-key square root solution! Wow,off to the mall I went.

I bought the cheapest box, complete with several blister packs of triple A batteries because these little tinker toys would go through a set of batteries in one afternoon and was I in seventh heaven, watching the bright red LED display calculate massive division problems. While tinkering with my new possession I accidentally pressed two keys at once and guess what? The number in the display suddenly resembled the square of the number that had been in the display just before the double press. “Noodling” around a little longer I suddenly something. MY ‘bottom line’ calculator actually had all those extra-cost functions. Because of the way the grid of keys were designed, pressing the right combinations of keys would generate the code that the missing buttons would have generated and the calculator processor just interpreted the code as if it was from a “real” key and gave the right answer.

Here’s a recent aircraft accident report that shows that there are “hidden” resources inside many GPS receivers that can be used for both useful and clandestine “after the fact” reconstructions. Just because there may or may not be a “key” or menu selection for a function may not mean it isn’t there.

…The NTSB requested radar data concerning the flight from the FAA but due to a technical malfunction with the recording equipment no data was saved. However, investigators did recover the pilot’s personal Garmin GPSMAP 295 in the wreckage and sent it back to the manufacturer for examination. Technicians were able to collect data from the unit and investigators were able to study the final minutes of the fateful flight…

Now the unit in question is a better than normal grade GPS. If you buy one at Wal*Mart, how much chance is there that someone could extract your data and how far back could they go? The definitive answer is, “It depends”.

But one thing for sure … you’d be well advised not to do anything illegal, immoral or fattening with any sort of GPS present. Don’t forget the GPS that may be in the rental car you use to rob the bank, the GPS in your cell phone, or even the non-GPS sensors in all modern cars that store the speed you were going when your air bags went off, how hard you were pressing on the brake before the accident, your average speed over the past hour, and so on.

Sometimes it’s just better to live your life as if your mom is watching, you know?