If you have nightmares about being watched, this will be your worst ever. Your mobile phone, the thing that you carry around almost everywhere, might be giving away your location to hackers. According to a new study, anyone with a cheap phone and open source software can easily track the location of a mobile phone (on GSM network, which provides service to 80 percent of the global mobile market) without the owner ever knowing about it.

Computer scientists from the University of Minnesota conducted a study and found out that it is an easy task for a third party to track the location of a cell phone user as long as the networks “leak” the locations of users.

Ph.D. student Denis Foo Kune says, “Cell phone towers have to track cell phone subscribers to provide service efficiently. For example, an incoming voice call requires the network to locate that device so it can allocate the appropriate resources to handle the call. Your cell phone network has to at least loosely track your phone within large regions in order to make it easy to find it“.

What a cell phone tower does is that it will broadcast a page to a phone and then wait for the phone to respond to a call. A hacker can easily force those messages to go out and then hang up before the handset rings. The researchers say that it is possible to track a device within an area of 100 square km just by checking out those messages.

And what are the threats, you ask? The researchers were talking about a few possible ones: “For example, agents from an oppressive regime may no longer require cooperation from reluctant service providers to determine if dissidents are at a protest location. A second example could be the location test of a prominent figure by a group of insurgents with the intent to cause physical harm for political gain. Yet another example could be thieves testing if a user’s cell phone is absent from a specific area and therefore deduce the risk level associated with a physical break-in of the victim’s residence“.

But they are saying that a few low-cost techniques which require no hardware changes can solve the problem. They are currently in talks with AT&T and Nokia regarding the matter.

Head here to take a peek at the full research paper.

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Are you waiting for a phone that can run on a single AA battery? The mobile phone pictured above is the SpareOne which is one such device. But the new device is not meant to function as your regular handset.  The SpareOne has been designed as a back-up phone which can be kept in your emergency kit. Using that one AA battery, the device can deliver up to 10 hours of talk time. But its most amazing feature is that it comes with an isolator that prevents current discharge which allows it to hold charge for up to a whopping 15 years when you are not using it. But that depends on the shelf-life of the battery that is being used.

The device can be used at emergency situations. For example, the phone will be a big help when you are traveling away and you have no way to charge your phone, or when there is no power due to a flood or earthquake. And if you carry a pack of batteries in your bag, you will be able to chat for hours on SpareOne.  As the SpareOne comes unlocked and requires a SIM, in order to use the phone, you will have to swap the SIM card from your regular handset. It’s coming in two GSM versions (850/1900 MHz and 900/1800 MHz) and with an always-on 911 feature (no SIM required) and an LED emergency flashlight. It will ship in March with a price tag of around US$50.

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