The Supreme Court of the US is taking a crack at the privacy of your cell phone's location data. They must decide whether geofence warrants are unconstitutional or not. A geofence warrant is issued by law enforcement and if signed by a judge forces a company such as Google to provide location data of all the cell phone users within a specified geographic area and a specified time window. This is typically within an hour or two of a crime and several hundred meters around the crime location....

Cell phone forensic analysis of GPS location in timing advance files T-Mobile’s timing advance file is used to estimate the location of the phone. It is used in legal cases and includes an estimated latitude/longitude location for the phone, date and time, phone information, tower information and the phone’s estimated distance to the cell. The position of the phone is typically an estimated one based on the time it takes for a signal to reach the phone. In its simplest form we can calculate...

cell phone forensic depiction of cell tower coverage areas as pie shapes is completely misleading