When are you safe from a phone tracker?

Cell phone tracking has emerged to be an incredibly powerful surveillance technology that is subject to weak technical and legal protections. With courts authorizing governments for cell phone tracking, government’s capability to track cell phone without service providers assistance and governments ability to track cell phone even when call is not being made, avoiding the threat of real time tracking is becoming impossible. The only away to eliminate the risk of tracking is to leave your cell phone at home and remove the battery. Usage of communication methods such as postal mail and landline telephones are the strongest and clearest legal protections unless you take specific technical measures to protect your communication against wiretapping or traffic analysis such as encryption to scramble your messages.

Cell phones and all the associated gadgets have tremendously changed the communication world by connecting our lives and others. You can talk to anyone wherever they are. You can be connected with your colleagues and loved ones at all times. Today, the market is flooded with new cell phones equipped with great and useful applications like email, GPS tracking and internet. The flip side of this technological advancement is its scope for possible misuse by stalkers, ex boyfriend, spouse or malicious persons.

Below are a few tips for protecting your cell phone privacy and safeguarding yourself against cell phone tracking:

As all cell phones provide access to information on recently dialed number and received calls, make sure you clean up the information after making private call.

In order to safeguard information regarding your family members, keep your cell phone contact list simple by not adding your family member’s addresses and other details on your cell phone.

Calendar feature in cell phones serves as an electronic agenda wherein you update your appointments. To save yourself from a potential stalker who can know about your next appointment having a look at your pone, you might want t keep very basic information on the calendar feature of your cell phone.

Make sure you delete the history of sent and received messages containing sensitive information pertaining to your passwords or personal information.

Most of today’s cell phones have GPS tracking feature allowing automatic time change when you travel between time zones. You may want to turn off the GPS feature if you are concerned about being tracked. However, you need to keep in mind that GPS feature can be important for 911 services to track you in case of emergency.

Adding a password to your cell phone can help protect information from information thieves. While you may not be able to rule out cracking of the password by dedicated people, you can be surely slow them down.

In the event of giving away your phone or wanting to sell the phone, make sure you delete all the information and reset to factory default buried deep in their menu system.

Keeping your cell phone with you at all times prevents third parties from installing GPS tracking equipment on your phone. Restoring factory settings helps to clear out spyware. You can protect yourself from cell phone tracking by ensuring only you have access to your phone.