Home
Sitemap
Global Network
Wireless systems capable of monitoring vehicles and people all over the planet (basically everything) are leaving businesses and the military aglow with new possibilities, and some privacy advocates deeply concerned. Companies seeking to tap the commercial potential of these technologies are installing wireless location systems in vehicles, hand-held computers, cell-phones (even watchbands). Scientists have developed a chip that can be inserted beneath the skin, so that a person’s location can be pinpointed anywhere.
Various plans already under way include alerting cell-phone users when they approach a nearby a store place, telling them which items are on sale, or sending updates to travelers about hotel vacancies or nearby restaurants with available tables. Another company may be provide parents with wireless watchbands that they can use to keep track of their children. Although the commercial prospects for wireless location technology may be intriguing, and the social benefits of better mobile emergency service are undisputed, privacy-rights advocates are worried. By allowing location-based services to proliferate, you’re opening the door to a new realm of privacy abuses. What if your insurer finds out you’re into rock climbing or late-night carousing in the red-light district? What if your employer knows you’re being treated for AIDS at a local clinic? The potential is there for inferences to be drawn about you based on knowledge of your whereabouts.
Until recently, location-based services belonged more in the realm of science fiction than to commerce. Although satellite-based Global Positioning System technology has been commercially available for some time for airplanes, boats, cars, and hikers, companies have only recently begun manufacturing GPS chips that can be embedded in wireless communications devices. GPS uses satellite signals to determine geographic coordinates that indicate where the person with the receiving device is situated. Real-life improvements in the technology have come largely from research initiatives by start-up companies in the United States, Canada, and Europe as well as from large companies like IBM, which recently formed a “pervasive computing” division to focus on wireless technologies such as location-based services. Location technology is a natural extension of ebusiness. It’s no surprise that a whole new ecology of small companies has been formed to focus on making it all more precise.
For instance, a Professor helped to create a chip called “Digital Angel” that could be implanted beneath human skin, enabling his company to track the location of a person almost anywhere using a combination of satellites and radio technology. After all, he reasoned, wouldn’t the whereabouts of an Alzheimer’s patient be important to relatives? Wouldn’t the government want to keep track of paroled convicts? Wouldn’t parents want to know where their children are at 10 P.M., 11 P.M., or any hour of the day?. A review of Digital Angel’s commercial potential, though, revealed concern over the possibility of privacy abuses. So that Professor, the chief scientist for a tech company, a company in a place on earth, which makes embedded devices for tracking livestock, altered his plans for Digital Angel, which is about the size of a dime, so that instead of being implanted it could be affixed to a watchband or a belt. Embedding technology in people is too controversial. But that doesn’t mean a system capable of tracking people wherever they go won’t have great value. Although Digital Angel is still in the prototype stage, the company is planning to make it commercially available in 2002.
Various plans already under way include alerting cell-phone users when they approach a nearby a store place, telling them which items are on sale, or sending updates to travelers about hotel vacancies or nearby restaurants with available tables. Another company may be provide parents with wireless watchbands that they can use to keep track of their children. Although the commercial prospects for wireless location technology may be intriguing, and the social benefits of better mobile emergency service are undisputed, privacy-rights advocates are worried. By allowing location-based services to proliferate, you’re opening the door to a new realm of privacy abuses. What if your insurer finds out you’re into rock climbing or late-night carousing in the red-light district? What if your employer knows you’re being treated for AIDS at a local clinic? The potential is there for inferences to be drawn about you based on knowledge of your whereabouts.
Until recently, location-based services belonged more in the realm of science fiction than to commerce. Although satellite-based Global Positioning System technology has been commercially available for some time for airplanes, boats, cars, and hikers, companies have only recently begun manufacturing GPS chips that can be embedded in wireless communications devices. GPS uses satellite signals to determine geographic coordinates that indicate where the person with the receiving device is situated. Real-life improvements in the technology have come largely from research initiatives by start-up companies in the United States, Canada, and Europe as well as from large companies like IBM, which recently formed a “pervasive computing” division to focus on wireless technologies such as location-based services. Location technology is a natural extension of ebusiness. It’s no surprise that a whole new ecology of small companies has been formed to focus on making it all more precise.
For instance, a Professor helped to create a chip called “Digital Angel” that could be implanted beneath human skin, enabling his company to track the location of a person almost anywhere using a combination of satellites and radio technology. After all, he reasoned, wouldn’t the whereabouts of an Alzheimer’s patient be important to relatives? Wouldn’t the government want to keep track of paroled convicts? Wouldn’t parents want to know where their children are at 10 P.M., 11 P.M., or any hour of the day?. A review of Digital Angel’s commercial potential, though, revealed concern over the possibility of privacy abuses. So that Professor, the chief scientist for a tech company, a company in a place on earth, which makes embedded devices for tracking livestock, altered his plans for Digital Angel, which is about the size of a dime, so that instead of being implanted it could be affixed to a watchband or a belt. Embedding technology in people is too controversial. But that doesn’t mean a system capable of tracking people wherever they go won’t have great value. Although Digital Angel is still in the prototype stage, the company is planning to make it commercially available in 2002.
 |
| Digital Angel Sys-Arch |
Some companies are even more ambitious. Plans to map every urban area in the world and allow these maps to be retrieved in real time on wireless devices. Yet while businesses around the world seek to improve the quality of location-based services, the biggest impetus behind the advancement of the technology has come from the government, through its effort to improve the precision of locating wireless connections of emergency calls. With the number of wireless users growing, carriers will need to begin equipping either cell-phones or their communications networks with technology that would allow authorities to determine the location of most callers to within 300 feet, compared with current systems that can locate them within about 600 feet.
People are justifiably concerned with the rapidity with which this technology is being deployed. They need to be assured that there is no conspiracy to use this information in an underhanded way.
People are justifiably concerned with the rapidity with which this technology is being deployed. They need to be assured that there is no conspiracy to use this information in an underhanded way.
