You're right about giving people their own tracking devices. More and more phones and cameras use GPS to "geotag" their photos with location data - time stamps are old hat already. When I started seeing ads for online photo storage for cel phones it dawned on me - law enforcement often gets overreaching approval to go through electronic records; all they would have to do is get a warrant to search one server hosting cel phone photos, and then run a facial recognition program over it and they would know exactly who was where, and when, and who they associate with. It's not some Minority Report conspiracy theory - this is simple to do with currently available, and even mature tech. It'll just be a little longer before it's very practical because geotagging is still catching on.

Since we can't count on laws to enforce courteously not violating people's privacy, I think the answer would be legal requirements for data encryption and storage for such records - on a phone photo host server they would have to encrypt every client's photos with a separate key, either known only to the client, or hashed from a password of theirs. This would prevent the convenient searching of whole servers at a time.

aaaaanyway, that was kind of a tangent, so back to the battery - that thing looks like it has the exact same dimensions as my Motorola KRZR battery. That's interesting because I was just thinking it may be foiled by a phone like mine that uses a sheet metal battery cover - apparently not so much.

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