[_ak]

If your mobile carrier offered a product to find the nearest gas station/hospital/supermarket 10 years ago (at least mine in Austria did), then of course it worked like that. At least in Austria and Germany, media regularly mentions police being able to locate people's phones by sending "silent text messages". That also uses the same principle. How else? People that knew about such tools and features, but did not realize that this obviously can be abused, how ignorant must they have been?

[mikeash]

There's quite a difference between "we can know where you are if needed" and "we track where everyone is at all times, and provide this information to the authorities."

We're at the point now where we pretty much assume that the former implies the latter. It was not always thus.

[_ak]

The "we track where everyone is at all times" is a fundamental principle of mobile telephony. Your carrier always knows in which base station you're logged in, otherwise you wouldn't be able to send or receive anything.