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Phone or Tracking Device?
Red Wolf writes "The first major commercial service that traces people's locations using their mobile phones -- mapAmobile -- is designed more to ease the minds of worried parents and suspicious bosses than to enable unauthorised spying."
I find the wording of the press release ironic.
;)
<paraphrase>
This device isn't really for spying, it's more to allow parents to spy
on their children, and employers to spy on their employees.
</paraphrase>
They of course fail to mention that if the technology were available, a judge
could easily grant a warrant to allow authorities to observe your
movements without notifying you.
In many ways this is worse than Orwellian, because at least in
Orwell's vision, you could still hide from the cameras or escape to
places that didn't have cameras on them. With this device if you had
it on (assuming it works as well as they claim (doubtful)) they could
pinpoint your location all the time. I guess you could just leave it
in your office while you went to play that round of golf and say you
were in a meeting.
Still this technology is simply a herald of more instrusive technology
to come. Move over Orwell, the future may be worse than you imagined.
As someone said in an earlier story, doubleplusungood.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
I wonder how this works since SIM cards are pretty small. Regardless, I like it.... to a point. Where I work, we have a lot of people who drive a lot of miles in their own cars. At $.365/mile, this adds up quickly (almost $1200/month). Even still, almost all of them cheat padding their monthly miles, or taking a very long route to get someplace. If they KNEW that they could be tracked, it might give honesty a kick in the pants. Where I don't like it is when someone is spied upon and never told. That's just not cool.
is designed more to ease the minds of worried parents and suspicious bosses than to enable unauthorised spying."
/., we say it's alright to use the Xbox as a home PC even though that's not what it was designed for. For that very reason alone, I am 100% sure that this will be used to infringe on at least one person's privacy.
And Kazaa is really just designed to transfer information back and forth. It's not Sharman Network's fault that it gets used to infringe on an incredible number of copyrights.
Let's face it, just because it was designed to ease parents and bosses, that's no guarantee whatsoever that they will not be used to violate one's civil liberties. RFIDs are designed to help stores keep inventory and make checkouts easier, but they can be easily abused to "see" what someone is wearing on his person.
We champion the right to use products in nonstandard ways all the time here at
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.
AT&T Wireless has had this for quite some time. It's called find-a-friend, and it lets you locate and be located by other AT&T GSM customers that you specify. I do have a GSM/GPRS phone with AT&T and I've read a little about the feature, but never used it.
My Sanyo 4900 has a location service. The paper instructions and phones internal help system claim if I shut the location system off, only 911 facilities will be able to know my location. What this really tells me is that it is always on from the phone end but Sprint will only pass the signal to the 911 system, not anyone who wants it. I also assume that the police will also have access to this also if needed or wanted. There is NOTHING that prevents law enforcement from going to Sprint or any other carrier and requesting a list of all users that were in a certain area at a certain time. This IS what the system is really being pushed for and why the Office of Homeland Security is the government department responsible for this E911 service implementation.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
It seems the general consensus here is opretty negative on this technology due to it's potential for abuse. However I can't help but feel if a couple of Uni students rigged up the same thing in their dorm room with a couple of pringles cans and aan empty pizza box, everyone would be applauding at how cool it is and how it has the potential to save the world.
Just a thought...