EGirl
#RockportStrong
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Actively ping. But not going to argue
You may remember that a young woman was recently abducted from a Target parking lot in Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City. Her body was discovered many miles away in Missouri. They were able to locate her by the sequence of cell phone towers that picked up her cell phone location. She had not attempted to dial out, but when her family was trying to call her the towers could sense her phone. Sadly, the authorities were not able to reach her in time. However, they were able to locate her body which was in an area where they never would have searched without the cell phone tower information.
R.I.P. Autumn
Your quote above is directly from the Snopes site. If you had copied the paragraph just after it you would have seen:
Theres nothing magical to it. For mobile phones to work they have to be in regular contact with cell towers, so when handsets are on, they emit signals (called pings) to nearby cell towers every few minutes to let the network know where they are.
Most complanies keep records of calls as well as a limited number of recent, routine locator pings.
http://www.snopes.com/crime/prevent/cellping.asp