Is Your Phone a Stalker? 3G and GPS Raise Privacy Concerns
By ryan | July 14, 2008
For years, there have been mobile devices available that can help us map out paths while trailblazing in the mountains or even determine our location if we get lost. This technology used, known as GPS (Global Positioning System), is quite a magnificent technology, which uses a network of satellites to give an extremely accurate position. Some devices even have the ability to use Assisted GPS (AGPS – uses nearby cell phone towers along with satellites) giving an almost exact pinpoint location.
This GPS ability has recently been introduced into smart phone’s along with blazing fast 3G internet speeds, introducing a whole new type of “growing sophistication of an industry — demonstrating the power of marrying precise location technology with the reach of the Internet on mobile devices”.
Having both GPS and high speed internet on your phone enables a consumer such services as finding stores, restaurants or any other local information based on your current, exact location. Merchants can use that same information to target ads to you, social networks could allow you to keep tabs on your friends, or even “pull up “geotagged” photos snapped and uploaded by others of the location in which you find yourself”.
Certainly this is interesting, but this opens a whole new bag of concerns. By having this technology available, this allows government, service providers, social networks, merchants and advertisers, to keep track and follow where you are and where you have gone. With the program Loopt, users can find each other on a map anytime their cellphones are turned on. It could also help find a missing child, or have parents keep track of where there kids have been. Jennifer Urban, a University of Southern California law professor stated with the washington post, “There’s a disconnect between our expectations of when we will be observed and who will be observing us and how that information will be used and what the technology is allowing companies to do,”. I couldn’t agree more. People don’t understand the privacy that we lose every day from the new features of the technology we invent.
The problem with this lies within the transparency of it, and where the consumer can draw the line and “turn off” where you are. Other issues brought up by James X. Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology include How easy is it for the user to turn the location function on and off, and how easy it is for the user to delete past location information? What are the companies collecting? Who are they sharing it with? How long do they store it? And what control does the consumer have over the information?
“What is needed,” James X. Dempsey said, “is baseline federal legislation covering all firms that collect personal electronic data.”
I couldn’t agree more. With good, there is always bad, its what you do with the information that determines that. Like I have always said, are you paranoid yet?
You can check out the original story here from the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/11/AR2008071103296.html
Topics: Internet, Security, Social Networking, Technology, Uncategorized | No Comments »