Tuesday, October 23, 2007
I know where you are . . .
Today's New York Times has an article about the new cellphone services that use the GPS tracking capablities in you phone to help people find out where you are at this very moment. Some critics are concerned about the potential loss of privacy:
Many people see only the convenience and security of knowing where their friends and family are at every moment. Parents can track children, husbands can track wives, friends can know exactly when you will be arriving:"[. . .] such services point to a new truth of modern life: If G.P.S. made it harder to get lost, new cellphone services are now making it harder to hide.
“There are massive changes going on in society, particularly among young people who feel comfortable sharing information in a digital society,” said Kevin Bankston, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation based in San Francisco.
“We seem to be getting into a period where people are closely watching each other,” he said. “There are privacy risks we haven’t begun to grapple with.”"
"Kyna Fong, a 24-year-old Stanford graduate student, uses Loopt, offered by SprintNextel. For $2.99 a month, she can see the location of friends who also have the service, represented by dots on a map on her phone, with labels identifying their names. They can also see where she is.
One night last summer she noticed on Loopt that friends she was meeting for dinner were 40 miles away, and would be late. Instead of waiting, Ms. Fong arranged her schedule to arrive when they did. “People don’t have to ask ‘Where are you?’” she said.
Ms. Fong can control whom she shares the service with, and if at any point she wants privacy, Ms. Fong can block access. Some people are not invited to join — like her mother.
“I don’t know if I’d want my mom knowing where I was all the time,” she said."
