Sat Navs Can Now Lead Police All the Way to Criminals

Current satellite navigation systems will pinpoint your location to within yards and will effortlessly choose the best routes using their advanced algorithms and extensive map databases. You can find your nearest curry house with a touch of a button or calculate the distance from Wildboarclough to Abbotskerwell in seconds. However now they have an added string to their bow…      They fight crime.

Police in London have been using one of the useful features of sat nav systems to implicate criminals in certain crimes. Car thieves, get away drivers, child groomers etc have all been caught with this technology. This is not an example of Orwellian style government, the Police are not monitoring where you are going rather, they are using a simple feature common to most sat navs.

When you select a location and create a journey the individual sat nav system will generally save the locations for future reference. All Police are doing is checking the sat nav and seeing if they have been to the scene of a crime. Incidents have occured where car thieves have stolen a car and programmed in their own house. When later found by the authorities all they needed to do was select ‘home’ and follow the simple directions back to the culprits.

Beverly Nutter, forensic IT analyst for the Metropolitan Police, has studied the hardware and the way it stores its data. “The persistence of the records for the TomTom, I think, is more to do with the way data is moved around when new records are added to the [mapping] file. The edited file is written to a new location and the older version remains until overwritten,” Nutter told reporters.

Unless you plan on committing a crime don’t panic! The Police will only ask for details of a sat nav with a court order and the contents are extremely well guarded by the manufactures who are continuously taking steps to improve privacy.

So not only will your sat nav comfortably guide you to your destination but like a real superhero it may also secretly be fighting crime. A sat nav system can be easily installed into any lease car from Nationwide Vehicle Contracts, for instance the Renault Laguna can be fitted with an integrated audio and bluetooth sat nav system for just £975.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Car and Van Info. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.