A phone with Buddy Beacon, a tracking service offered by Helio, a mobile phone service provider.
Posted on 10/22/2007 10:44:59 PM PDT by neverdem
Two new questions arise, courtesy of the latest advancement in cellphone technology: Do you want your friends, family, or colleagues to know where you are at any given time? And do you want to know where they are?
Obvious benefits come to mind. Parents can take advantage of the Global Positioning System chips embedded in many cellphones to track the whereabouts of their phone-toting children.
And for teenagers and 20-somethings, who are fond of sharing their comings and goings on the Internet, youth-oriented services like Loopt and Buddy Beacon are a natural next step.
Sam Altman, the 22-year-old co-founder of Loopt, said he came up with the idea in early 2005 when he walked out of a lecture hall at Stanford.
“Two hundred students all pulled out their cellphones, called someone and said, ‘Where are you?’ ” he said. “People want to connect.”
But 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.”
But the practical applications outweigh the worries for some converts.
Kyna Fong, a 24-year-old Stanford graduate student, uses Loopt, offered by Sprint Nextel. 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...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
if you don't like the system you can choose not to drive
but then comes the bionic transponder implant
you can choose not to get it implanted but then you must remain in a defined area
That's not what the E.T.s do to your butt, is it?
Can I point out the obvious?
This service doesn’t tell you where a person is, it tells you where their phone is.
Yep, and I do not think that this feature makes use of GPS, either. These lacations are determined by traingulating among cell phone transmitters.
My recent typo was meant to say locations, not lactations.
I prefer lactations. Tracking people by their breast milk secretions sounds like an interesting approach.
An Active, Purposeful Machine That Comes Out at Night to Play
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
Do you ever get the idea that the entire country is under house arrest these days?
Not much of a choice there depending on the package they received at work. My company pays for a lot of my personal expenses including comprehensive BB service. If they decide to include sat-tracking I probably wouldn't be aware of it. The BB I have already has the sat capability as a GPS unit built into it. I just don't have much of a need to use it outside of business travel.
I can see where this is a problem when someone's using sick days as beach days and stuff. If you work for the kind of company that would track you for that, you roll your dice and take your chances.
What you postulate is only the beginning.
Unless there is some type of war or other catastrophe the rate of change and innovation will only increase. In fifty years this will all seem so old-fashioned.
I read an long article about a much worse aspect of this technology last month. The cel phones with the GPS installed can be activated in a listen mode by the FBI. If you have one of these phones you are a walking bug. There is no way to turn off the GPS capability (or the listen capability), You can only turn off the ability for your GPS position to be seen by other subscribers. The only way to disable the listening capability of these devices is to disconnect the battery. I will try to find the original article on this and post a hypertext link to it.
This is not a tinfoil hat, black helicopter rant. It is a case of our government massively overstepping the dividing line between it's responsibility and our privacy.
Nothing new here, this has been the case for years. Anybody with a scanner that receives the appropriate frequencies plus an additional transmitter to trigger the microphone can do the same. Add in a little inexpensive hardware and know-how that could be found by googling it, and someone could follow your phone around the country.
This is not expensive, or rocket science. It's even legal to eavesdrop cellphones.
Seriously, though, I see a lot of downsides to technology which can be readily abused by any police state, even our own.
I know, it isn't quite here yet, but in a few years, with tools like this and Onstar, and others, it could be--with a vengeance.
bump for later
It certainly is not. Just ask the Martins.
It’s a brave new world, Winston.
The Martins got in trouble for recording wireless telephone conversations, and passing them to others, not for eavesdropping. A certain democrap senator still has not paid his penalty for passing those recordings to the media.
The radio spectrum is public property, and contrary to democraps trying to protect the privacy of terrorists, the law holds that there is no expectation of privacy in open wireless calls.
Recording of calls, however, is subject to federal laws.
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