Chili Fries
Man Sleuth
- Joined
- Jul 15, 2009
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LE does it every day in cases all over the country. It's very common stuff. Ping info is kept on remote servers. I'm not sure if the data comes from the company operating the towers or from the phone company, or if that varies. I think I do remember reading about one case where the data had to be retrieved from the tower location itself.The question is, how hard is it to actually, physically recover the data? How is such data saved? In the telephone, on a server somewhere? Does it involve intensive data-mining? Of course, there's no doubt that the police would have been working on it ASAP.
I'm just trying to assess the likelihood that LE would be able to recover anything useful from this or if it is a needle-in-the-haystack at best.
I suppose it is safe to assume that if they had a 'ping' from, say, JR's phone in Gnaw Bone, Indiana 90 minutes after he last reported seeing her, they'd be a lot closer to finding her and cracking the case.
I know that in rural areas covered by few towers it can be tough to pin down locations but that also depends on what kind of antenna the tower has and, as somebody else has pointed out, the GPS capability of newer phones makes things easier. I agree that if LE doesn't have ping info already they will have it soon.