Nova Scotia police found the body of a missing motorcyclist Wednesday by tracking the GPS on his cellphone.
RCMP said the 48-year-old man left Hammonds Plains at about 8:30 a.m. to shop in Bridgewater. When he didn't return home, worried relatives called police.
Cpl. Joe Taplin said investigators contacted the man's cellphone service provider, and that led them to a ditch in Hubley, southwest of Halifax.
RCMP found the motorcyclist and his Yamaha at 11:30 p.m.
"The cellphone had a GPS on it and by using that we were able to locate the man near Joshua Slocum Drive," Taplin said.
GPS-equipped cellphones can allow police to track missing people and criminals.
But conventional cellphones without GPS can also be tracked, says Jesse Hirsh, CBC Radio's technology columnist.
"When cellphones connect, just making themselves available to accept calls, they are leaving a data trail of all the cellphone towers that they connect to, and that allows carriers to literally map out where a customer is," he said.
But that provider has to record and then recover the information, he added.
"From that data you're able to get a rough estimate of where people are. I mean, the accuracy is very general, it doesn't show you, for example, a specific intersection. It would show you a general area of say several hundred metres."
An RCMP traffic collision analyst is trying to determine the cause of Wednesday's crash. An autopsy is planned for Thursday.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/06/17/ns-fatal-motorcycle-crash.html#ixzz0r8MwAq9M
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