Thank you. All of this is familiar to me
Snipped.
Snipped by me. I think other users have replied enough about why I don't think this would be feasible: too many pings, only vague data. Also:
a) Even a conservative estimate of 1,000 people in town and 500 tourists would mean a lot of phones pinging any towers in the area, especially since many people have more than one phone. You'd have a mess of information with so many phones from so many different carriers.
b) As I said in my previous post, someone who was doing something shady and using their phone for those purposes would likely be using a prepaid card and a disposable phone IMO. If you go with the theories that a whole pedophile ring was involved then it makes even more sense.
c) Even if GM didn't do that, he could easily have left his phone back at the resort (I imagine that if he was sneaking around he wouldn't have wanted to risk a phone alerting others to his presence, plus if the McCanns did it IMO they would have thought of that when covering their tracks).
d) Signal strength doesn't necessarily mean proximity as far as I know. This is why you can get such a strong signal farther away from a tower but a weak one inside buildings closer to it. It's also something that can depend on the phone. I remember that around those years, sometimes my phone would have a different signal strength than the phones of friends who were right next to me and had the same carrier, sometimes even the same phone model. I'm sure that if the PJ detected such a thing then there would be a million possible 'explanations'.
e) If something shady was found out then once again I'm sure people would be able to come up with a million other explanations and excuses.
The Smith sighting, as far as I'm aware, wasn't even taken as such as serious possibility and people still have doubts about it - given that it's based on a '60%-80%' certainty that it could have been GM because they walked similarly.
I'm not saying that means the McCanns didn't do it. If they did, they could easily have also had other possible time frames to dispose of the body, not only the specific time when the Smiths may or may not have seen GM. The Smith sighting turning out to be wrong still wouldn't prove or disprove anything either way, it would just place GM somewhere else at the time of the sighting. That's it. It wouldn't prove that he was innocent because other times could have been found to dispose of the body, it wouldn't prove he was guilty because him being somewhere else could just mean... exactly that, that he wasn't out and about when Smith saw him.
Going through the time and trouble of sifting through long strings of data that raise many privacy issues to obtain when there's only a chance out of many that it may do something and that something may not be enough evidence to fully clear or incriminate anyone... that hardly sounds incompetent to me.
I'm also very amused by the fact that you think smart phones don't exist in Portugal because it's a 'poorer country'. Lots of people there nowadays have smart phones, I'd say it's pretty much the same as other European countries. In 2007 I think they were simply less common worldwide because they were far more expensive and unless your job required it, it wasn't as necessary to get one as it is today when everyone has one - from the businessman checking his e-mail on his way to work to the teenage girl instagramming her pizza. Nowadays you can get a basic smartphone for under $200 and they're very easy to use. Not so at the time. The first iPhone was released in the United States in mid-2007. The first Android phone if I recall correctly was released later than that. They were just not as common as they are today, in 'rich' and 'poor' countries. Not to mention, the people you wanted to check up on (Smith and GM) aren't even Portuguese - and I assume they had no phones with GPS capabilities or that would have come up earlier. :floorlaugh:
EDIT: According to an article posted by Estelle, the Tapas 9 and their phones were placed under surveillance and the phone records were checked. It also seems like pings were indeed used to determine the location of calls. While the former was done by British experts, apparently, why don't you blame a vast Portuguese conspiracy with the PJ and mobile carriers all involved?
></O
