The Perils of GPS Tracking: What Were You Doing at Bongo's Beefcake Boutique?
Some of us won't be enabling those cell phone GPS tracking devices right away. We might just not want to be found—for reasons that aren't even nefarious.
Tue, August 28, 2007
CIO — When I dropped by to see my friend Abednego the other day, he was up to his pointed elbows building a cell-phone tracking device. His face lit right up when he saw me. "Just the person," he yelped cheerily. "I needed a guinea p— tester!"
Apparently to qualify as guinea p— tester, all I had to do was haul his phone along as I ran my errands. While I shuttled around the city with Abednego's GPS-enabled cell phone, software would update my location, identifying me as a blue flashing pinpoint on a Google Maps site.
Why would Abednego want a mobile anything that lets people track him? Apparently there are great reasons.
His family could see when he was five minutes from home, for example. (I wondered how his teenagers had slipped that one in.)
His wife could phone to say she'd love to fix salmon for supper if only someone—who was driving practically right past—could pop into Fresh 'n' Finny to drop some fillets in the old market basket. That way dinner—if not his life—would be instantly richer and juicier.
If his friends had similar devices, Abednego could check maps via his own cell phone to see if his buddies were in the neighborhood. Voila: rendezvous down at the pub.
And, of course, there could be genuine security benefits. Since 2005, phones sold in the United States have been GPS-enabled to accommodate the FCC E911 regulation requiring that cell phone carriers be able to locate specific phones for 911 emergency calls.
But there's a big issue raising its butt-ugly head. At least in theory, this increased location monitoring means you can be tracked by a lot of folks now, at least according to the Privacy Rights Clearing House. Security protection from stalkers, jealous SOs, and nosy neighbors with nothing better to do than watch everybody via electronic maps has to be an issue.
A 7th Circuit Court ruled in March of this year (Gale Document Number: A164160247) that GPS tracking is not a violation of Fourth Amendment privacy guarantees. If the thought of folks following you around gives you the creeps, this is the kind of thing to jump up in your face, shake you by the shoulders and yell, "Boo!"
But in this instance we're talking friends and family—not the FBI.
