Patentable idea, perhaps? But it’s pretty simple, it just ought to be implemented. Ok, here’s the idea. Your cell phone, if it’s a modern phone, probably includes a GPS device. I know that on my phone, I can toggle my GPS setting between “all the time” and “911 only”. This doesn’t seem to accomplish anything other than setting a privacy option, though (wherein we trust that nobody can locate your phone when it’s not dialing 911); it would be a nice feature to actually use this existing GPS capability to display one’s current latitude and longitude, and perhaps some phones do this, but I haven’t run into any. Anyway, let’s assume that hooking the GPS into the phone’s operating system to actually display the information which the phone is capable of gathering anyway is a piece of programming cake. So now, my phone can do it and your phone can do it. Let’s say I’m looking for you. (I thought of this while trying to find a friend, where he was describing his surroundings while I was describing mine, and we were trying to locate each other this way. Being that we were in a large open area of a park, our surroundings consisted of particular trees and configurations of park benches, and although finding each other was relatively easy nonetheless, the idea I’m describing here is extensible because it could be pretty useful in plenty of other situations. So I started thinking, since I’m calling him on my phone, couldn’t his phone just communicate with my phone and they could tell each other their respective latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, and then I could walk and my phone could beep like a radio tracking device, with the beeps getting faster as I got closer, and vice versa? This would make finding people easy; you just home in on them. To solve any privacy issues, I could “release” my location to a certain phone number for a certain period of time. To prevent any third party from snooping, or the carrier from knowing my location, the information could be encoded using public-key encryption, the same way secure websites work so that only the end computer and the server can talk to each other but anyone else along the communications path can’t understand what’s being said.

So remember, if you see this feature on a cell phone some day, you read about it here, first.