Reactions to story from The Wall Street Journal
Phones Will Soon Tell Where You Are
http://online.wsj.com/ public/ article/ SB120666235472370235.html
Wireless carriers are rolling out services for people-tracking, made possible by GPS. Increasingly, the industry is deciding that location tracking has so much sales potential that it's worth the risks involved.
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Spy Cells: Phones Will Soon Tell Where You Are (Wall Street Journal)
http://kelsocartography.com/blog/?p=320Spy Cells: Phones Will Soon Tell Where You Are (Wall Street Journal) April 1st, 2008 By AMOL SHARMA and JESSICA E. VASCELLARO (Wall Street Journal) March 28, 2008; Page A1 Would you want other people to know, all day long, exactly where you are, right down to the street corner or restaurant? Unsettling as that may sound to some, wireless carriers are betting that many of their customers do, and they’re rolling out services to make it possible. Sprint Nextel Corp. has signed up hundreds of thousands of customers for a feature that shows them where their friends are with colored marks on a map viewable on their cellphone screens. Now, Verizon Wireless is gearing up to offer such a service in the next several weeks to its 65 million customers, people familiar with it say. WSJ’s Jessica Vascellaro tests out Loopt’s new buddy-tracking device to see whether it’s helpful for hooking up with friends or just another invasion of privacy. Making this people-tracking possible is that cellphones today come embedded with Global Positioning System technology. With it, carriers have already offered mapping features such as turn-by-turn driving instructions. But they long hesitated to offer another breakthrough made possible by GPS — tracking of cellphone users’ whereabouts in real time — because of privacy and liability concerns. Now, increasingly, the wireless industry is deciding that location tracking has so much sales potential that it’s worth the risks, so long as tight safeguards are in place. It’s a result of the convergence of GPS with another digital phenomenon: a generation of young people who are comfortable sharing a great deal of personal information on social-networking Web sites and eager for still more ways to stay connected. The initial target market of location-tracking services: 18- to 24-year-olds. Continue reading at WSJ.com … . Posted in General, Interactive, Mapping, Print, Promote, Software | No Comments »
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Watching Your Every Move
http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2008/03/watching-yo...I tend to lag behind technological advances. This one, however, has me sputtering with incredulity. We are all aware that our cell phones are miniature tracking devices. But it had never occurred to me that people would pay for a service to use them as tracking devices – voluntarily. This WSJ article is an eye-popper for me. The article begins: Would you want other people to know, all day long, exactly where you are, right down to the street corner or restaurant? Unsettling as that may sound to some, wireless carriers are betting that many of their customers do, and they’re rolling out services to make it possible. Sprint, Verizon, and others are signing up “hundreds of thousands of customers” who seem perfectly willing to allow others to track their location at any time. This service is being driven by “a generation of young people who are comfortable sharing a great deal of personal information on social-networking Web sites and eager for still more ways to stay connected.” The article does highlight some of the privacy concerns, particularly regarding “abuses” of the service that could occur through stalking, sexual predators, and criminal investigations (e.g., one service allows a user to send a false location as protection against stalkers). Perhaps I was too deeply impressed by a course in dystopian fiction as an undergraduate, but the possibility for governmental abuse seems substantial to me. Even ignoring the strange problems of social control that exist when persons volunteer to participate in a system of social surveillance like this, as I understand current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, what users voluntarily share with third parties, they also essentially make available to governmental officials (e.g., like the phone numbers one dials). Add this to the Katz formula of social expectations, and it would seem the 18-24 year olds who like to watch each other’s every move are significantly altering social practice and therefore shifting all of our constitutional privacy protections. I suppose one upshot is that parents will never have to ask “where were you all afternoon” anymore (but neither will the inquiring government official).
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Watching Your Every Move
http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2008/03/watching-yo...I tend to lag behind technological advances. This one, however, has me sputtering with incredulity. We are all aware that our cell phones are miniature tracking devices. But it had never occurred to me that people would pay for a service to use them as tracking devices – voluntarily. This WSJ article is an eye-popper for me. The article begins: Would you want other people to know, all day long, exactly where you are, right down to the street corner or restaurant? Unsettling as that may sound to some, wireless carriers are betting that many of their customers do, and they’re rolling out services to make it possible. Sprint, Verizon, and others are signing up “hundreds of thousands of customers” who seem perfectly willing to allow others to track their location at any time. This service is being driven by “a generation of young people who are comfortable sharing a great deal of personal information on social-networking Web sites and eager for still more ways to stay connected.” The article does highlight some of the privacy concerns, particularly regarding “abuses” of the service that could occur through stalking, sexual predators, and criminal investigations (e.g., one service allows a user to send a false location as protection against stalkers). Perhaps I was too deeply impressed by a course in dystopian fiction as an undergraduate, but the possibility for governmental abuse seems substantial to me. Even ignoring the strange problems of social control that exist when persons volunteer to participate in a system of social surveillance like this, as I understand current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, what users voluntarily share with third parties, they also essentially make available to governmental officials (e.g., like the phone numbers one dials). Add this to the Katz formula of social expectations, and it would seem the 18-24 year olds who like to watch each other’s every move are significantly altering social practice and therefore shifting all of our constitutional privacy protections. I suppose one upshot is that parents will never have to ask “where were you all afternoon” anymore (but neither will the inquiring government official).
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where am I?
http://captivatingconnections.typepad.com/captivating_connec...Soon your phone will be able to tell you where you are!
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The state of privacy…or lack thereof.
http://www.wpromote.com/blog/2008/03/28/the-state-of-privacy...I think this is super scary. As reported today in the online edition of the Wall Street Journal, wireless carriers are moving towards making GPS available to its customers, for the purposes of tracking the whereabouts of their friends in “real-time.” Wow. Yes, I know, global positioning system technology in cell phones is nothing new - I use it to get driving directions on my phone when I am lost (this happens a lot). I think it’s great. All I have to do is say where I am and it tells me how to get where I’m going. Lovely. The problem? I don’t want everyone else to know. On one hand, I see a value in people-tracking. There are definitely those five to ten people I will talk to on any given night, the ongoing text messages saying “Are you on the Westside?” or “We’re at the beach to the left of the pier, come meet us.” But what about the fact that technology is not fool-proof? No, technology is not fool-proof. I know I’m not the only one out there who has had their personal lives disrupted and relationships challenged by the voicemail that was never received, the email that never actually sent, the revealing text message accidentally sent to the wrong person, or the Facebook message posted on your wall that you didn’t want him or her to see but nevertheless forgot to adjust your privacy settings. In some cases, user error or sheer coincidence is to blame - in many others, the confusion is a result of a technological error. Keeping this in mind, making people-tracking widely available to cell phone users opens up the possibility for big time trouble. I know the wireless industry is aware of this, and the potential for major problems is largely the reason behind them having waited so long to launch the service. Still, the steps the carriers are taking to make the technology safer, i.e. limiting its use to those 14 years older and above, reminding users during the first few weeks that the service is on and they are being tracked, making tracking possible only among those who have purchased the service, and allowing users to turn the service “on” and “off” just aren’t cutting it. What happens when you “forget to turn it off” or accidentally give access to someone you frankly wish you hadn’t? I know there are some out there who may think I’m “small-minded” and that I just don’t “get it.” And while I believe that people-tracking is exceptionally useful in some situations, i.e. making a film on a rugged location, camping with a large group of people, or taking the kids to Disneyland, I wonder if we aren’t making things more complicated as we adopt new technology, both on and offline. Combine the advantages and pitfalls of GPS and other wireless technology with the benefits and downsides to online social networking (downsides including the Mystalking and Facestalking phenomena), and we know more about our personal network than we ever have before. Still, without a context from which to interpret the virtual and digital footprints of our friends and loved ones (and in many cases, there isn’t one), who is to say we aren’t driving ourselves crazy with a bunch of information we just don’t need to know? Save this Post! Hide Sites
