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I want tracking despite paranoid concerns

GiveMeGizmos 15th Apr 2008

I personally think that there is no real need to be concerned about any government big brother conspiracy nonsense if you are not a crook or a terrorist. Nonetheless, I understand the concern. But you would have to look at the particular tracker solution that you are going to use and determine for yourself if you can trust it and if you can trust whoever is running the tracker service.

I'm using Trackion which is a $3/month service for one windows laptop. And I'm using TheLaptopLock which is a freebie tracker service on three other laptops. On a Macbook, I'm using MacPhoneHome (one-time $29.95 cost) along with MacLoJack (freebie at a private server, not related to Lojack for Laptops, but more similar to Orbicule Undercover). For each of those services, as well as looking at the other major services, I looked at if it worked, was it free or pay, how the tracking was done (was it just IP addresses, or were screenshots taken of user activity and photos taken of the user, and if the tracking is done all the time or if you can turn it on only when needed like when the computer is stolen), and then looked at whether the people running the tracking service were trustworthy.

I would be more worried and freaked out if I had no way to get my computer back. If you have a lot of important data on your computer, whether that be client data or tons of family pictures or tons of other stuff that would be difficult to reconstruct, I would want some way to track down my computer.

Of course, backup and encrypt because even if you have a tracker, the computer is still gone if it is stolen and there's no telling when you may get it back if you do get it back and you don't want anyone else going through your stuff. And also set your firmware password on the macbook -or- change the bios on the windows laptop to boot first from the harddrive (and not boot from the CD drive) and set a password on the bios on the windows laptop, to ensure that no one wipes your harddrive clean thus removing any tracker that you may install.