Is there a tracking chip in the iPhone?

There isn’t really a way to know exactly where it is, even with the 3G iPhone. A carrier can disable a phone from working on their network if they have the IMEI code, but the phone can be hacked and the IMEI can be changed.

Perhaps Apple will implement some sort of tracking solution as an enterprise feature in the future, in the same way that they have remote wipe.

How about Lo Jack for your iphone?

And the chip wouldnt be for if you wanted to find your phone, it’d be for if someone wants to find you. (NSA,CIA,etc.)

Requires hacking the phone, though. I’d also be a little worried about my privacy.

You don’t actually need a chip for phone tracking, all you need is three cell towers or a van and two towers. further more, the nsa, if they have recording of your voice can tell when ever and wherever you are even if you change phones for every call. It works even better if they have an idea where you are; city or region. Also it would be good to note that your phone has a certain code that it sends to the cell network, it doesn’t even have to be on for the network to receive this code and know your location. Its best to have the battery out of the phone if worried, and put it in a basement. So to sum this up, any phone that’s not an analog phone, with they don’t make any more is susceptible to this, remember those old Nokia Brick phones that came out with the original Snake game on it? those are the last of the analog phones. those are the best to have, I have a few sitting around for when I feel skittish.

Any phones sold in the US (i.e. All of them) are required by US law to have either GPS or other location fixing technology (such as cell tower triangulation) that can be accessed by “emergency” services. Furthermore, the FBI recently convicted some people for organized crime using evidence recorded from cel phones that were in the room during a meeting but not turned on. So, they clearly have the ability to remotely monitor any mobile phone’s microphone, even when it is off.

That’s bullshit. you can not remotely turn on a cellphone and use it’s microphone. You can track the location, but you can not do the microphone thing. The phones must have been switched on. Most probably, the newspaper or wherever you read this obviously messed up their sources.

@wilhel1812: It’s called Hollywood and paranoia. I also love the myth that you can sample, filter and compare millions of audio sources at once (re: Scrumpulator). Matching word patterns in audio recordings is relatively easy… getting positive IDs on voices is harder… and getting positive IDs on millions of audio feeds at once is even harder. We don’t have computers that can deal with that yet.

I suppose we’ll also believe the thing about the “phone sonar” featured on The Dark Knight. People actually believe that cell towers have the capacity to deal with that much information.

@wilhel1812 Just because you don’t want it to be true, doesn’t mean that it isn’t. It is certainly technically possible and, given the police state that the US has rushed toward at break-neck speed over the past 8 years, its also highly likely. The fact that this was evidence presented in US District Court makes for a highly credible source (and easily cross referenced), not to mention that its easy to find references to the report… here is one from a simple Google search (which you could have done yourself):

FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool

@wilhel1812 – what makes you so sure that noone has such a capability?

To answer the original question: yes. The chip used for ALL transmitting and receiving in the iPhone has been in use the last 15 years as a GPS tracking chip for animals.