Hello all. I am writing a novel and seek an answer to this please. Could the police (UK) electronically track your approximate location on another continent (Australia) if all they knew was your email address and you logged in to your email using a public cafe network? The police do not know your log in password. This is in the year 2000. Thank you.
Tracking location from overseas log in
- Thread starter RunRun
- Start date
Thank you very much. Could I ask how they would do this, as I have people telling me it is not possible?. So an email from a known email address sails through the ether from a new IP address, across the world.....how do police know it is there to trace its IP address? Yes...I am no computer nerd obviously.
Okedokey
Well-Known Member
Tracking clients embed a line of code in the body of an email—usually in a 1x1 pixel image, so tiny it's invisible, but also in elements like hyperlinks and custom fonts. When a recipient opens the email, the tracking client recognizes that pixel has been downloaded, as well as where and on what device.
Thank you again. And that would be a clever thing for the police to do...but that would not fit my story scenario...so my question above really remains. I think the answer is that the police could not track someone just from knowing their email address if no email was sent to or by the police. They would need the cooperation of that email company to track activity of one of their email clients....but I am not certain that is right. Appreciate your help.
I think you need to just gloss over the technicals and operate under the assumption it's feasible. Pretty much anything of this nature is with the right connections and deep enough wallet. Stuff has also significantly changed since 2000 so anything we might suggest could be inaccurate then. Only a security professional would really know if what you're saying is wrong, and works of fiction get technical stuff blatantly wrong all the time.
If you have to ask these questions you're not really in a place to write about them with confidence or details to be convincing to those that would care enough to know what you're saying is true or not.
If you have to ask these questions you're not really in a place to write about them with confidence or details to be convincing to those that would care enough to know what you're saying is true or not.