Free Cell Phone Tracking - Best Cell Phone Tracker Apps

I can teach you how to use a free cell phone locator service to track people with their cell phones. Read on and I'll show you how.

In recent years, cell phone manufacturers started installing GPS receivers in cell phones so that people could be easily located in the event that they needed to call 911 from their cell phone. This service is called enhanced 911.

It didn't take long for clever people to figure out that they could write applications that make it possible to use their cell phones as cell phone tracking devices. There are several cell phone locator services to choose from these days.

Some of them are free, other cell phone locator services charge a fee. Some require you to download and install special software on your cell phone and some don't. Some cell phone locator services require you to subscribe to a data plan and some don't.

The beauty of GPS cell phone tracker services is that there is a service that will work with most any cell phone. Whether you want to keep an eye on your children with a cell phone locator or you want to keep track of your employees, there is a defiantly a cell phone locator for you.

I don't know how we can ever really know that answer to that one. It's entirely possible that the cell phone locator technology is much more sophisticated than we are currently aware of. When GPS technology was first made available to the general public, the government felt that for reasons of national security, civilian units should be restricted in their level of accuracy.

In time, we're bound to see better results from a cell phone locator service. There is some question about whether or not running programs that allow cell phone tracking will have an affect on cell phone batterys charge time. Time will tell and as cell phone batterys become more advanced, this won't be as much as an issue.

**Update** I've since learned that cell phone tracker apps don't use much battery power which is good because in order for a cell phone tracker to work, it must be running on your phone.

Another, more modern and accurate way a cell phone locator service works is through GPS (Global Position System). This service is also available to emergency services. In addition to emergency personnel being able to locate a cellular phone with this service, it is available to private individuals.

There are still a lot of limitations to a GPS cell phone tracker service.

• The user must usually subscribe to a service and pay a fee to both the service company and your cell phone carrier.  There are some free services that we've already shown you.
  
• The user must have a cell phone that supports the service.
• The user must have a cell phone provider that supports the service.
• The user must have special software installed on their phone.Some services like the Srint Family Locator and Glympse don't require this.
  
• The users phone must be turned on AND the software must be running.
• The service only works when when your phone is in your network coverage area.

As you can see there are quite a few limitations to a GPS cell phone locator service. It's not expensive but it's not fool proof either. A GPS cell phone tracker won't work if you are in a basement.  Some cell phone trackers however can try to find you if you are inside a building by attempting to use Wi-Fi hotspots to pin point your location.

Traditionally, a mobile phone locator technician would use triangulation. Whenever someone has their phone turned on, it sends intermittent "pings" to the cell phone towers around it. This is the phones way of knowing whether it is in a roaming area, how strong of signal it has, and what towers to use when you need to either receive to make a phone call.

Triangulation as a cell phone locator is only an estimate of where the phone is the last time it was "pinged". Law enforcement can send a ping to the phone only in an emergency. Any other time, your cell phone location is considered part of your private information. They would need a warrant to ping the phone for non emergency reasons.

A worried parent certainly can't ping the phone to find out where there child is. This is really your only option if you have a trackfone prepaid phone.

Well, for the time being it looks like cell phone locating a mixture of both science fiction and science fact. It is possible to some degree. Depending on the circumstances, it may work perfect one time and not at all another.

I expect the technology of cell phone locating to evolve quite rapidly. In the meantime there is a device called a GPS vehicle tracking device that will give you instant and real-time tracking data.

Sprint Family Locator - One very good cell phone locator service that you must pay for is the Sprint Family locator. Sprint only charges $5.00 a month for this service and it is well worth getting.

You don't need to download or program anything onto your phone for this cell phone tracker to work. You don't need to subscribe to a data plan. You can do an unlimited number of searches for only $5.00 a month.

They also have a very cool feature that will allow you to program the application to send you a text message with the location of anyone in your cell phone tracking network at a predetermined time of day.

The Sprint Family Locator might be the perfect solution if you don't have a new programmable smart phone

There are many fee based cell phone locator services to choose from but there is also a free service offered by Google. Who would have thought that Google of all companies would offer this service. Well, it actually makes a lot of sense because their software, Google Latitude, works hand in hand with Google maps.

Another free cell phone locator is called find my iPhone but it only works with the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. You do have to sign up for MobileMe to use Find My iPhone but it's free for 60 days. If after the 60 days is up, you decide that you want to stay with the service, it will cost you $99 a year.

Another free cell phone locator is called Glympse. With this one, you simply go to the Glympse website and send a text message or email to someone that you want to be able to track your cell phone. You set a time limit for each message that you send. This way, the person who receives the message can only track you for as long as you set the timer for. This cell phone locator service is great for business users.

As good as these phone tracker apps have become at tracking cell phones.  They still aren't perfect and there are some limiting factors that you should probably know about if you plan to use them.

List of Limitations:

1. There's no way for these apps to automatically turn your phone on when you need to use them so the phone must be turned on or they won't work.  This means that if you have an occasion to use them like when you misplace your phone, you should attempt to locate the phone right away before the battery dies and the phone turns off.
2. The app's won't be able to start remotely either.  They have to be running in the background of the phone or they won't work.  They don't use many resources which is a good thing and that means that they won't slow your phone down or run your battery down.
3. The phone needs to be in a cell phone service coverage area and have a signal or they won't work.
   
4. There are some circumstances that will limit the accuracy of the apps.  If you are in a building that blocks the phone's ability to use it's GPS receiver to calculate the location of the phone, the accuracy won't be as good.  In some cases it will report the last known location of the phone.  In other cases, the app will attempt to determine the location of the phone with other methods.
   

There is a very cool feature that is available with some of the premium cell phone tracking applications that are on the market called "geo fencing". Geo fencing is basically a feature that allows you to establish "virtual boundaries" for people in your phone tracking network.

This is a great feature to use for keeping track of teenage drivers. Once you have established the "geo fence" you will get a text message alerting you to the fact that the person who was carrying that cell phone breached your virtual perimeter. You can then get on the phone and find out why your teenage driver is driving some place that you have forbidden them from driving.

I'll bet you didn't know that it's actually really quite easy to retrieve deleted text messages from a cell phone. Some cell phone tracking apps such as SpyBubble make it possible to retrieve these so called deleted messages without ever having the phone in your hand.

How doe they do this, you might ask? Well, as it turns out, nothing is "actually" deleted when you delete data from a cell phone. All that happens is the name of the particular bit of data is removed so you don't see it anymore on your phone.

This deleted data will remain on the phone until new data is stored in it's place. How long this will take really depends on the how much data your phone is capable of storing as well as how much new data is continually being added to the phone.

If you get 2,000 text messages a month, this old data may be recorded over fairly quickly. If you only get a few texts each month, it may stay on your phone for months.

If being able to recover deleted text messages from your cell phone tracker app is important to you, you can check out SpyBubble.

Here's a short video from Google on their free cell phone locator called Google Latitude.

This is a short video from a free cell phone locator service called Glympse that you might enjoy watching.

It's your responsibility to check the local laws that pertain to tracking someone with their cell phone without their knowledge prior to doing so.  If it's illegal to do this where you live, don't do it.