[smolder]

You can't imagine police departments that buy stingray devices and spy illegally with them to also pay for surveillance data? Anyway for real time tracking, police stations can likely get the feds involved which get that info from your telco, who are best buddies with the federal government.

[ponyous]

Yeah... but I am not american, but from a tiny european country. Police makes some requests for data after the fact every year, but as far as I know there are no deals between police and giant american corporations. I'm probably naive.

[smolder]

Ah yes, sorry to assume.

[ponyous]

That's fair, we are on mostly American website after all!

I'm just traveling through France and saw on the news that a woman disappeared. They are trying to find her by triangulating the last location based on nearby cell towers of where she was last seen. So even giant European countries can't/don't use facebook/google to locate people.