Most of us are now comfortable with GPS being inside our phone and constantly enabled. It can guide you to your destination, track your excercise and tell you how fast you’re going. For some, though, GPS is a technology they’d rather not have.
A study by Sentinel found over 60 GPS jamming devices in a 6 month period. The jammers, which tend to be used by drivers with GPS trackers, block out the GPS signals but can affect an area of between 200 and 300 metres. The jammers are easy to buy across the internet and are relatively cheap. Drivers using them can stop their employers knowing where they are but can also interrupt jam signals for nearby sat-navs, phones and other devices which are dependant on the GPS positioning and timing signal.
Professor David Last told the BBC that..
A GPS satellite emits no more power than a car headlight, and with that it has to illuminate half the Earth’s surface. A very, very low power jammer that broadcasts on the same radio frequency as the GPS will drown it out.
Most of them are used by people who don’t want their vehicles to be tracked.
The Sentinel research project used 20 roadside monitors to check when GPS signals were being jammed.
GPS information is now used in a variety of smartphone apps, with location information sent to Facebook, Twitter, Google and other sites unless settings are altered. This survey appears to have revealed a number of rather unhappy delivery drivers who don’t like the idea of their movements getting tracked via GPS.
Link – BBC News