GPS tracker used in Watchdog sting; hold on to your butts when the N95 arrives
Check this little story out (also forwarded by Steve – thanks!)
FollowUs (www.followus.co.uk), the UK’s leading mobile location solutions service company, has aided BBC’s Watchdog to uncover how one airport car parking company was mistreating a customers’ car.
Aired on the 27th February, the show followed the actions of an employee of a Meet & Greet service with the hidden FollowUs Win200 GPS logger device to track the movements of a bait car. It revealed the car was left on the side of a road and outside a supermarket for three nights when it was meant to be in a secure compound. The device also revealed the driver breaking the speed limit eight times as well as topping 100mph twice.
The company has since stopped trading.
Kevin Brown, Commercial Director of FollowUs, commented,
“The size of a box of matches, this device can be hidden and provides additional security for your property. As the programme showed, you just download the log onto your computer to see details of the movements based on time, speed or bearing. We are happy to see the device work in such exciting ways and help Watchdog for a good cause.”Available from FollowUs’s online store, www.followgb.co.uk, the Win200 GPS logger unit costs just £99.99 (+VAT). The device can be used with Google Earth for mapping and can recharge using the car’s cigarette charger.
Now, satellite ‘things’ — GPS devices — are not that widely available still. Yes, you can buy one for a tenner to plug into your PocketPC or Nokia, but they’ve never really (in the UK at least) been integrated into consumer-level handsets. I know the iPaqs have got them — but the really interesting moment will come when we’ve got 500,000 handsets in day to day use each sporting an integrated GPS.
In three years will even Nokia’s cheapest cardboard mobile handset have GPS in it? Quite possibly. Heh.
I wonder, though — how good is the GPS in an N95? If you left it in the car’s glove box, would it still get a signal?
