Of course you can turn off the tracking; turning off the phone shuts down the GPS signal. But if you're absent-minded, you might not want to be an early adopter.

No kidding. These new technologies usher in new risks. About a million tech-years ago I worked at a company where the ethics department offered a standard lecture against e-mail abuse. It included the chilling "true" tale of one former employee who, with one wrong click, sent embarrassingly salacious private details of where, when and (blush) how to a whole workgroup rather than to the single individual for whom her note was intended. The two people involved were married, as it happened—just not to each other. We need to learn something from these moral tales.

Not only can the too-much-information syndrome strain relationships, but it also interferes with goofing off, an art form so nearly lost in our culture that this could be the final nail in its floppy disk.

Suppose your last business meeting ends early and you head down to the local bistro. You just want to sit there peacefully by the window, sip your latte, and read Passion and Perfect PC Management, a Sgt. Biff Mikklestone Mystery.

You don't want a bevy of boisterous friends bouncing in to sit beside you.

You don't want to go to the fish market.

You don't want to have your sister call to ask you to bring a double-tall vanilla ristretto because she noticed you're within 20 yards of an espresso machine.

Some of us won't be enabling those GPS tracking devices right away because we might just not want to be found—for reasons that aren't even nefarious.

And one more thing. I went to Bongo's only to drop off a key with my cousin's neighbor's brother—just as a favor. I didn't even cross the threshold—well not far, anyway—not that Abednego had any right to ask...

If you must, however, watch or be watched, here are a few sites that probably won't get you in too much trouble:

• A (heh) cell phone tracking simulation to send to friends.
• The GPS Visualizer site with enough GPS links to software—including freeware and shareware—to satisfy enthusiasts.
• Disney Mobile offers GPS tracking of kids by parents (and vice versa, probably).
• Several mobile GPS mapping services are available, like the ones using Google Maps on the Helio Drift and Blackberry 8800. But for those of us who travel coach, some nifty instructions in the archives at Popular Science show how to do it for about a hundred smackers, which is at least a cheap way to let folks track your whereabouts.