An article that came out Friday in the WSJ discusses Sprint Nextel Corp's decision to provide a service to customers that lets them know where their friends or family are. It employs GPS tracking system, which many cell phones already have installed for map search purposes. Verizon Wireless is planning to implement a similar application. Privacy and safety issues are a concern for this feature. The question arises on where should the line be drawn in terms of the tradeoffs between privacy and information? This debate is central to the technology revolution. This is also related to cell phones people-tracking in order to advertise, say for example whenever they walk by a Starbucks. It seems that the sales and marketing potential for this feature is too great to be passed up, so people have to accept privacy invasions for some service benefits. Though if we compare ourselves to London, there are cameras everywhere and the government can track people at any time anywhere. Of course this is different from making the potential for people-tracking abuse widespread.
A side that the article presents is that because of social networking websites young people are comfortable with sharing lots of personal information. This is true and dangerous. We will never again be able to achieve the same degree of privacy our parents had. So it seems that people should get comfortable being who they are because it is very difficult to hide anything.
I heard that by law, GPS technology is supposed to have built-in inaccuracies as a terrorist precaution. So, very often the GPS cell phone devices will be off by about two blocks. The article does not really address this at all, though I suppose these systems are much more accurate, than they are inaccurate.
As I said in my last post, I love technology, but I think I'll pass on big brother people-tracking.
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