I lost my Iphone, why can't AT&T use my GPS to locate it?

I lost my Iphone, why can't AT&T use my GPS to locate it?

You have to do it through icloud. It has to be registered. And if it's off you won't ever get it traced.

Well, if you have the original iPhone. There's no GPS chip.

If you have the second generation (G3) iPhone, they can't, simply because you're inside. The iPhone uses a bunch of trick to locate itself. GPS only works if you have a clear view of the sky in multiple directions. For indoors, the iPhone uses a system that has mapped pretty much all of the 802.11 nodes in the country, and they use triangulation based on signal strength from multiple sources to give an idea of where you are, indoors (or anywhere, with the original iPhone).

The second generation iPhone, like most modern cell phones, has a real GPS chip and antenna in it. This won't work well or at all indoors, but it does work outdoors. The original phones with GPS couldn't do anything but ping their location in response to an encrypted request by law enforcement. Modern cell phones with GPS can enable the GPS, but only based on user authorization. And that's locked in deep… If you could simply ask to turn on the GPS and have it send you location data, other could use that same technology to follow you against your will.

On the other hand, AT&T should be able to detect if your phone ever reconnects to their network again (which it will, if someone switches it on and they're in range of an AT&T cell tower). There should be some means for tracking lost or stolen cell phones in this way, but they don't generally seem to offer this service -- all I can say is that it's possible. It's also possible for the cell carrier to verifiy you're you and then list the phone as stolen, which (you'd think) would let law enforcement turn on the GPS chip. But they don't seem to do this.

There are add-ons, for laptops and probably for the iPhone by now, which do this for you, as a precaution. You run an app on the computer, and it hits a specific web site once in awhile. If you report your device stolen, that web site enables the device-resident app next time it logs in, and from then on, you get GPS or other location data (you enabled that when you installed the app and answered its questions).

Of course, being a GSM phone, if someone found your iPhone and took the SIM card out, there's no way to find it again. They could pop in an alternate SIM card and start using your phone, and no one would know it. Unless you had that recover app secretly running. It would connect as soon as the phone was on the network again. Or maybe it would even try to send out data via SMS…