A lot of people ask themselves how in the world a cellular phone tracking application can be so accurate and how they can even be able to pinpoint someone's location.
The most basic method of achieving this is through a process called triangulation. This process works like this: the cell phone always sends a signal to the nearest cell phone towers thus giving away its location. A tracking application will try to find other two cell phone towers that are near this cell phone and then it will create a triangle around it. Through a lot of weird calculi, the tracking app is able to determine the approximate location of the phone. There are a lot of other factors involved in this way of tracking a phone and that's why it's not so accurate.
Who would have thought that Wi-Fi can help a phone tracking application? When a mobile phone is located in a Wi-Fi hot spot it will automatically ping it. This is not such an accurate way of tracking a cell phone but it can be really accurate if the hot spot has its own IP. These Wi-Fi hot spots use a shared IP address. This means that they share it with someone else. Imagine if the person lives on the other side of the world. This is how accurate this kind of tracking device can be.
There is another method which is by far the most accurate. This method takes advantage of the small GPS chips in smart phones. The tracking device will send a signal of some sort to the GPS chip which will then be forced to access twelve satellites so that they can get a really accurate idea of its location. These coordinates are actually based on latitude and longitude. After getting this information, the cell phone will send it back to the application which is tracking it. This is how you can get an exact location of phones in just a matter of seconds.
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