Every day people disappear around. In Ukraine, there are dozens of disappearances a day, in Russia there are already hundreds. If you look at the statistics for the year, then these losses add up to absolutely crazy numbers — tens of thousands of people who have gone nowhere. The losses of the population in this category can be compared with the losses in a rather large military conflict. Most then, however, find. Some even alive.
Why and where do people disappear? The answers to this question can be very diverse. The elderly suffer from memory loss, the young suffer from an excess of romanticism. There are love stories, there are purely criminal ones. Add to this the political conflicts that break out here and there, human trafficking, law enforcement agencies as a danger factor. There are many absolutely mysterious situations when a trustworthy worker or a mother with many children simply disappear without any reason or trace. Some kind of mysticism.
Is it possible to protect yourself and your loved ones from such situations? Of course, it is impossible to give an absolute guarantee of safety, but some preventive measures can be taken. In this article we will tell you what ways there are to ensure that you are always aware of finding your friends, family and friends.
The first, simplest and, at the same time, quite effective way that comes to mind is the special services of your telecom operator. As you probably know, cellular technology allows you to determine the location of the subscriber with a certain degree of error.
If you enable the appropriate service, you will be able to find out at any time where your child, spouse, friend is. To do this, you just need to send a special SMS to the mobile operator. In response, you will receive either a text message with its coordinates, or a fragment of a map with a mark. It is also possible to track the location using a computer on a special website via a web interface.
An example of such services in Russia can be Beacon from Megafon and the same name from Kyivstar, Locator from MTS and so on. The main argument in favor of using these services is the ability to determine the location of a person even if a person has a completely ancient phone. The options for using this method, as well as the level of payment, may differ from different operators, so it is better to clarify the information on the corresponding homepage.
For all owners of modern smartphones, there are special programs that use the GPS sensor to determine its location and send it to your relatives and friends on request.
All tracking applications of this platform can be divided into two categories: tools for searching for a missing gadget and specialized family security programs for monitoring children.
To search for a person using one of the programs of the first category, you must first install a special client on his device and know the credentials. You can read more about how it works in our publications:
The leader among the programs of the second category until recently was the Google Latitude service (Locator), but after its closure and subsequent revival under the wing of the Google+ social network, which, as you know, not everyone likes to use, it's time look towards the competitors. Among them are the programs Glympse, Life360, MapTrack, MamaBear, GPS tracking. You can read more about them in our article:
All owners of Apple devices are familiar with the Find My Device service, which is used to determine the location of devices. Since the service is designed to search for lost or missing gadgets, it is quite logical to use it to search for their owners.
You can also use a third-party GPS Location Tracker application that continuously tracks the coordinates of the gadget and transmits them to a remote server. By opening a special website, you will be able to see the current location and the history of movements on the map.
Also pay attention to the Find My Friends program, which allows you to determine the location of your friends' and family's devices using an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Optionally, you can also provide access to information about your location for a limited time or enable automatic notifications of location changes.
If you or your friend successfully ignored all the methods listed above, but there was an urgent need to establish the location of the missing person, then you can try to take advantage of the capabilities of cellular providers as a last resort.
All the stories that three communication towers can determine the exact position of the phone at any time are only partially true. In fact, the phone does not transmit any reports to the base stations at rest, and the accuracy of such a determination can be quite approximate and depends on the density of the towers in a given area. In other words, it is easier and more accurate to find an intensely calling, SMS-sending citizen than a rarely using the phone of a rural resident. You can find out more about why this is the case in this article.
Nevertheless, the technical possibility of approximate determination of the subscriber's location by its position relative to the base stations is still there. And sometimes even such inaccurate information can help to outline the circle of a person's search and recreate the picture of the incident. You can get more detailed instructions on this in an extremely useful publication that appeared after the recent disappearances of people in revolutionary Kiev If a person with a phone has disappeared and you are looking for him.
As you can see, there are tools to significantly increase the security of yourself and your loved ones. There are a lot of them, there are both completely free and commercial solutions. The only thing that is required of you is not to postpone the solution of this issue for later, in the hope that it does not concern us and maybe it will cost us. So that there would be no need to spend sleepless nights and endlessly call morgues, hospitals and local police stations.
