With the school year started, I embellished a description of the parent web portal at my sons’ school, indicating that in addition to providing us feedback on assignments and tracking their performance, there were also sensors throughout the school that would track and report their movements and could tell if they were paying attention. My oldest is wise to my ways, but before confessing, the eyes on my youngest got really wide, and he exclaimed, “That’s creepy!”
I can’t help but feel the same way about certain combinations of geospatial and sensor technologies these days. That same morning I found news stories about: a school district that was exploring the use of RFID technology to track students; a landmark case in the Ninth Circuit that upholds the right of law enforcement to attach GPS tracking devices on vehicles parked on a suspect’s property without obtaining a warrant; and a large back-scatter sensor (the same technology as full-body scanners) mounted in a van that can see through walls and into vehicles. All three of these technology applications cross a line for me, which got me thinking about larger issues of public acceptance.
I realize that it’s a changed world these days due to legitimate security issues post 9/11. There are also far fewer privacy concerns these days in terms of the details that we’re willing to share about our personal lives. What makes me a bit queasy about this progression of increasingly invasive technologies is the potential for a severe backlash that might impact even less invasive and useful sensor and location technologies.
Unexplored Territory
Law and policy governing the use of geospatial and sensing technologies related to privacy concerns are largely unexplored in much of the world. While the lack of restrictions has provided an open environment for some exciting innovations, there is legitimate worry that some company will come along with a whole new class of technologies that grossly violate rights and privacy in the name of profits, and upsets the whole market for the rest.
Google has raised concerns throughout Europe with their Street View technologies, particularly after it was discovered that their vehicles capture private WiFi signals and some data. It make sense that there would be a backlash from countries that have experienced repression, and close tracking of movements for nefarious purposes. But the rest of the world seems to simply shrug and move along, without raising much concern about guidelines for tracking technologies, location data use, and sensor capture.
Location Implications
Just this last week, the wildly popular social social media site Facebook added location to the mix with their new Places functionality. With Places, the site harnesses existing check-in technologies to share your location in order to meet up with friends and create larger social connections, uncovering when you’re where. Included in this mix of capabilities is a feature that lets you tag friends that are with you.
I can’t help but think back to the kind of pranks and tricks that go on in young adult life where that tagging feature could lead to misunderstandings and embarrassment. There are implications to locations and our movements that get interpreted differently by friends and family. Explorations into the wider world, and a sense of independence, could be greatly curtailed by this and other tracking and reporting features, and there are societal implications to these new capabilities.
Unknown Traces
While it’s true that location can be turned on and off with most applications and devices, it’s often hard to remember when we’re opening our location and on what device. At any moment, we could be sharing our location via our phones, via Twitter and other social media tools on our computers, and via photos that we’re taking with our cameras.
While for most of us, these traces and tracking of our lives are benign, there seem to be an increasing number of stories regarding the use of these tools for cyberstalking, and property theft. This issue is particularly true of photos that are geotagged to reveal the location of our homes, hang-outs or our prized belongings.
On the personal tracking and tracing side, the correction to this issue may simply reside with a little more active common sense about when and how we use these location features. A warning from our devices when we’re about to geotag a photo or reveal our location would also be a helpful feature.
When it comes to broader location data capture and sensing concerns, the employment of laws and policy to guide business practice may be in order, before any one company or cause ruins the trust that the public has placed on these technologies. Germany is set to look at drawing up guidelines for online mapping late next month. Perhaps that will be a start for some fair and reasonable measures to protect against location technology abuses so that we continue to make the best use of these powerful tools.
RESOURCES
Location Services Pose Huge Security Risks, by Kim Komando, USA Today, Aug. 26
Cyberstalking on the Rise, by Aimee Heckel, Daily Camera, Aug. 26, 2010
Geoslavery (PDF), by Jerome Dobson and Peter Fisher, IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, Spring 2003
Centre for Spatial Law and Policy
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