zlacker

>>fortra+(OP)
Something I was wondering about in this case ... They tracked the killer through his use of burner phones 10 years ago.

And I obviously know phones continuously ping cell towers.

So that means somewhere out there, there's a database of all cell phones and their locations for all time, with fine-grained resolution? They don't ever delete it, at least not in the last 10 years?

Or it's 1 database per cell provider ? I guess phones ping towers that are not owned by the company that provided the phone

I'd be curious if anyone has a link to a good summary of how this works, and the location tracking implications. Do they have to do a subpoena, or is it just a big database everyone's doing joins against? What's the resolution of the data?

I knew that people obviously get caught due to cell phone tracking -- it comes up in every one of these cases, like the Idaho killer recently. But I'm slightly surprised they reached back 10 years and did it

>>chubot+sg
> So that means somewhere out there, there's a database of all cell phones and their locations for all time, with fine-grained resolution? They don't ever delete it, at least not in the last 10 years?

If this surprises you, what do you think the carriers did with all their SMS traffic?

>>gumby+qj
I worked the SMS department of a major carrier about 15 years ago.

We only kept messages for about 2 weeks.

Long term storage would have been crazy expensive and I'm pretty it's illegal to mine that data.