Handsets frequently send tiny communications — basically saying “here I am” — to cell towers and other receivers, regardless of whether you’re using them.

With triangulation, it’s possible to determine the handset’s (and thus your) approximate location. Over a period of time, your path through a mall or other space can be tracked.

Path Intelligence, a startup in the UK, says it’s in talks with airports, museums and amusement parks, interested in its FootPath system, which lets them track cell phones (and anonymous customers) through their public places, says CNN.

FootPath, which went on sale last summer, is already being used by mall operators. A key feature is that it lets them measure how long customers stay in the mall (demo).

You create an invisible path as you head from one store to another. For the manager of a mall, it would be useful to see the paths made by you and hundreds of other shoppers over time.

If that tracking communications can be kept anonymous — so that a specific phone’s movements can be tracked but not connected to an individual — then they and the patterns that they reveal can be put to commercial or civil use without infringing on privacy rights.

In one case a retailer sought a rent reduction because of the economic downturn. That request was dropped after the mall manager showed data from FootPath indicating there had been no corresponding drop in foot traffic.

Other startups are focused on measuring road traffic via mobiles.

Cellint, an Israeli startup, offers a system called TrafficSense that delivers travel times, traffic speeds and incident alerts in real-time by tracking anonymous cell phones.

Traditional road sensor systems, with buried magnetic loops in the roadway, are much more expensive and tend to be used only on major metropolitan highways. The cellular-based systems, at a fraction of the cost, can more feasibly cover entire road networks by measuring secondary roads as well.

“The world is crying out for cost-effective solutions for traffic monitoring and real-time traffic data,” says Michal Eshkol, a Cellint representative.

Of course cell phone tracking is a feature offered by many carriers:

• Sprint Nextel’s “Loopt” service sends an alert when a friend is near
• Verizon’s Chaperone service ($9.99/mo), can set up a “geofence” around, say, a few city blocks and receive an automatic text message if a child, holding the cellphone, travels outside that area.
• AT&T’s TeleNav Track from TeleNav, tracks mobile workers and can provide accurate estimated time of arrival and keep record of customer visits.

“Most people don’t realize it, but they’re carrying a tracking device in their pocket,” said Kevin Bankston of the privacy advocacy group, Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Cellphones can reveal very precise information about your location, and yet legal protections are very much up in the air.” Microsoft’s MapPoint Location Server, for example, allows developers to create to create “geofence” applications for Smartphones.

Google’s traffic maps (above) show current traffic congestion. Google Maps now lets you know how long a drive might take in rush-hour traffic, for a limited set of metropolitan areas.

Traffic congestion maps that produce a graphical, realtime or near-realtime representation of traffic flow are the way to go. Data is typically collected via loop sensors embedded in the roadways, then processed by computer at a central facility and distributed as a map view to users.

Traffic.com, a NAVTEQ company, is a leading provider of personalized traffic information launched JamCast for real-time traffic video in 30 metropolitan areas across the U.S.. JamCast features patented Jam Factor roadway traffic measurements that allow commuters to easily understand the relative congestion level with a number on a scale from 1 to 10.

Traffic.com also offers service to mobile phones and PDAs. Traffic.com also offers text alerts — go to mobi.traffic.com on your mobile web browser, then text your city code.

Related DailyWireless stories include; Tracking The Pope, Google Transit Maps + WiFi, Automatic Vessel Identification Goes Wide, Ford Syncs Telematics, Tracking Tour de California, MIT’s CarTel, Super Bowl XLII, Car Nets, Cell Location Tracked by Government, Navigation by Cell Phone, Fish Net, Low Power WiFi Sensor, CellDar: Monitoring Traffic via Cell Radiation, Wireless River Monitoring, Google Transit Maps, Wireless Bridge Monitoring, RFID for Plants & People, NYC: London-style Surveillance, Sensor Nets Get Small, Traffic Mapping, Tracking Vehicles: Good to Go, Umbrella FlickrVision, Mapping Highway Data, 3-D Traffic/Weather Maps, Cellular Navigation/Tracking, Wireless Parking, Geocoding Content & Telemetry, Grape Networks, Spy Squirrels, Sensors Expo 2007, Open Source Zigbee Net, MaxStream ZigBee module, RF-ID Giants Merge, Realtime Tracking: WiFi is the Ticket, RFID Tracking via Dutch Umbrella, Active ID & Temperature: On the Road.

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Sam Churchill and Don Park run the DailyWireless.org website which summarizes the news from Community Lan and other industry related sectors with detailed updates from around the world. It is full of sausy talk, viscious rumors and tantilizing tidbits.

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