Is Your Phone Spying On You?
ONE ADVANTAGE -- or disadvantage, depending on your point of view -- of mobile phones is that they hide your location. When people call you at home or work over a traditional landline phone, and you answer, they pretty much know where you are. But when they call your mobile phone, you could be just about anywhere.
(If someone tells you they're at their
desk, but you hear waves, seagulls and calypso music in the background, be
suspicious).
The golden days of automatic cell phone location cloaking
are about to end. GPS and other "location awareness" technologies are being
built in to new mobile phones. And soon they will be able to track your
whereabouts -- or, at least, the whereabouts of your phone.
Location services based on GPS are popping up in Europe. In Switzerland, a company called Sunrise provided GPS-assisted drunkenness services in a trial. The Swiss CPR Group's GeoGeny technology was tested by Sunrise during the holidays in volunteer taxis used to drive drunk people home. The location service was used by dispatchers to track and locate the drivers in real time. The trial was a success, and national carriers across Europe are mulling the addition of GeoGeny-based location services.
In the U.S., AT&T Wireless already has what it calls a "Find Friends" feature that tells you roughly where other AT&T customers are.
Eventually, location awareness in phones will be
standard everywhere. Like most new technologies,
this will be a mixed bag of goodness and gotchas.
On the one hand, GPS
will surely come in handy when you're lost -- or when your phone is lost. It
will be nice for parents to know where their kids are, and a convenient way for
emergency workers to find people in need. Fun services will emerge, such as
blogging sites that enable you to phone-blog pictures during your vacation, and
have your blog automatically reflect the geographic location of the pictures.
On the other hand, location systems -- like other networked computer
systems -- are potential targets for hacking and abuse. The last thing you want
is for criminals and malicious geeks knowing your exact location at all times.
And location services will inevitably prove to be fraught with problems. They
will never work as well as people will want them to. For example, GPS doesn't
work indoors or near tall buildings. If you live in Manhattan, fuggetaboutit.
On yet a third hand, various products and services will emerge to make
GPS-enabled cell phones much more usable -- and desirable. Bell Labs announced
this week "rules based" server 
software that gives users control over
who can access their location information -- and
how.
Other non-GPS technologies are emerging to provide many of the benefits of GPS location awareness, without the added expense of GPS electronics, but also without the accuracy. A new service available in Australia called Text Track enables parents, employers and others to find out roughly where a phone is by querying it via SMS. The phone replies with an SMS message revealing the location without ringing or notifying the carrier of the phone. "Zones" can be set up -- for example, if junior is grounded from going to the mall, that location can be flagged -- and parents get a message if the zone is violated.
This is just one early application out of thousands yet to be conceived.
Location awareness is coming to a phone near you. Where are YOU (on the location issue)? Do you want it? Or do you want no part of it?
There's nothing new under the sun, but there are lots of old things we don't know. - Ambrose Bierce
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