"That's an iPhone...right?"

[634-5789]

[brush]

1. Exactly.

I have a question though. Is your cel trackable in your pocket or purse when it's not in used?

[lpbk2713]

2. Maybe not.

If your purse is lined with lead.

[paleotn]

16. Faraday cage for your cell phone.

You can actually get little pouches that do that, but, as soon as you take it out to actually use it...found ya! Really tough to be invisible in this society.

[Cuthbert Allgood]

3. If it's on, yes.

There are things you can do to shut stuff off, but if someone doesn't care about the law, they can track a phone that's on if they know certain information about it.

On the less tinfoil hat side, that is how Google Maps knows if there are traffic jams. Phones in cars are being tracked and the data is used to see how traffic flow it. That's also how the algorithm is so good for ETA. It uses the speed of current traffic on each road and not the speed limit.

[malaise]

4. Well mine tells me how many steps I walk per day, per week, permonth

and it's rarely in my hand. It even produces lovely graphs

[brush]

5. Somebody give me a straight answer.

If the cel is in your pocket or purse and it's off, can it be tracked?

[634-5789]

7. Nope, It's off, it's MIA.

[rateyes]

8. No. Nor if you are in airplane mode.

[CaptainTruth]

15. Gets rid of ads in games too!

There's a solitaire game I like to play on my Android phone to wind down my brain before bed, but the free app is loaded with ads. Loaded to the point of being incredibly annoying, & you have to pay to go "ad-free."

I've discovered I can just put my phone in airplane mode before I launch the app & the game plays just fine, with no ads!

[rateyes]

17. I do that too.

[krispos42]

20. I usually just give them the money

It's worth it to not be bothered, and it's also usually cheap. The music player I use, it was $1.99 to stop ads, the weather app (which basically just repackages NOAA and NWS data) was $4.99, I think Words With Friends was $9.99. That's the most expensive one.

There's a GPS app that I use to simply display raw GPS data, and for like $2.99 it either became ad-free or I was able to access enhanced features, I forget which. I wanted something that worked independent of the internet, so that's why I got it.

And I think iSyncer cost me $4.99, but that lets iTunes on my PC sync playlists on my Android phone, which is vastly convenient for me.

None of these are subscriptions (screw that!) but the cost to me is measured in pennies per month. Totally worth it to not be bombarded with tons of ads all the time! And it helps the little guys some.

[Maru Kitteh]

9. Demanding answers from the internet is fruitful and savvy.

[brush]

11. It's a yes or no simple question, not asking for the secret of life.

Either someone knows it or doesn't.

[Hekate]

14. We do have a groups for that, but GD is kind of random...

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=forum&id=1092

[kimmylavin]

10. No.

Not in general.
You can only track the last cell tower it was pinging to when it was switched off.

There are programs that will track a phone once switched off and while still using battery power to send a signal (apparently the NSA uses them), but they would have had to have been installed earlier, as malware.

[Hekate]

12. If what I have been told is correct, you have to turn it all the way off. Every bit.

As soon as you want to make a phone call and turn that function on, it pings a tower.

[CaptainTruth]

13. Not if it's off. And I mean OFF, turned off with the power switch.

If it's powered off (the equivalent of taking the battery out) it can't send or receive signals, & therefore can't be tracked.

I don't know if there are any phones that go into standby & still transmit location data when they're turned "off" using the power switch. From an engineering standpoint it's certainly possible to design a phone that does that, I just don't know if anyone has. I haven't heard of any, but I'm not an expert on the latest phone designs.

[FoxNewsSucks]

18. I'm not sure why all the "no" answers

A few years ago there were a number of stories about the CIA or FBI or the phone companies being able to remotely turn on a phone without the phone's owner being aware. It was supposed to be for legitimate law-enforcement surveillance, but it's probably possible for hackers to do it as well. There is also spyware that can be put on a phone which would do the same thing. The only way to be sure your phone is completely off and no one is tracking you or accessing your camera/microphone is to physically remove the battery.

Since then, phonemakers have made batteries non-removable. One can only wonder why. . .

[BobTheSubgenius]

6. Yup.

You know the old saying "Out of the mouths of imbeciles..." Oh, never mind. That was "mouths of babes" which have only the usual chance of becoming imbeciles in later life.

[paleotn]

19. These are the same folks who post....

their entire lives on social media. Their info, including personal attributes are harvested, sold and fed into algorithms to generate ads, junk mail and all sorts of annoying, selling type stuff created primarily to separate them from their money. But they don't want to be tracked.