This week I decided to focus on two of the new GPS enabled technologies sweeping the nation: Wherifone, designed for kids, and Google Latitude designed for adults.
http://www.mobilewhack.com/reviews/toys_r_us_to_sell_wherify_wherifone_gps_locator_phones.html
The first is Wherifone, a small cell-phone designed for children, equipped with five pre-programmable buttons that can call family, close friends, and emergency help; and incorporating aided GPS location technology to help track and locate the child. This "lets parents, caregivers and safety officials quickly locate a child in need of help, bringing peace-of-mind and added safety to the mobile family." The system lets parents control who the child calls, but gives them immediate access to their location and a means of communication.
This invention is another example of how new technology is permeating our lives. The convenience and peace-of-mind provided by a cell phone helps parents overlook the fact that perhaps GPS tracking their kids isn't the best idea. At first glance the idea seems brilliant, kids are always wandering off, giving parents moments of extreme panic when they cant find their children. The Wherifone makes their location immediately searchable, saving parents the stress of those false alarms and helping them actually locate the lost child if necessary. However, as I have discussed previously, any GPS system is hackable and might be used by those without the child's best interest at heart. Pedophiles and kidnappers could locate the child using this same technology, and perhaps even judge the distance between the child and parents. This seems to be a danger that Wherifone hasn't fully accounted for and must before children start getting snatched off the streets and conveniently dropping their phones in the process.
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=1&hid=103&sid=5effe07b-d20c-401a-b326-53bfd1e4ed25%40sessionmgr110&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=aph&AN=37035021
The other technology is Google Latitude, which lets users keep track of each other's locations from either smart phones or laptops. An interesting feature is that "In addition to restricting specific people, Latitude will let you do a blanket location setting for all your contacts. You can set your location manually, tell Latitude to detect your location, or hide your location completely." This produces a number of interesting questions about using Google Latitude for various purposes. Children could manually set their location to be a friends house when they were actually in a dangerous situation. Would this convince the parents they didn't need checking up on when they really did? What about employees? They could "take a sick day" and set their location at home while really running all over the city. What difference would it make for the people in charge to have a faulty way to keep track of their employees instead of no way at all?
In all likelihood, this might prevent Google Latitude from being subpoenaed for the location of a subject: half the time they would be completely fake and offer no help at all for tracing criminals or re-creating the scene of a crime. Another factor is that "Google says that it keeps only your most recent shared location on its servers. If you've hidden your location, Google holds no information on your whereabouts."
In this way, Google seems to account for many of the privacy issues prevalent in other location-based technologies. It would still be possible for an outside source to track Google's publication of various locations, however as likely as not those locations could be broad enough or plainly false in such a way as to protect the user's privacy.
Both technologies help people keep track of each other, either parents of their children or adults of their friends and co-workers. While both devices are undoubtedly useful in there own spheres, they raise a number of ethical questions about how the technology might be used. While sometimes this use might seem to protect (privacy in the case of the Google Latitude user), other times it is a weakness that might cause harm to the user (small children with Wherifones being tracked by predators).
Wherifone: When you were explaining this, I thought it was really cool. It has the perfect amount functioning for a child, and the gps capabilities would be awesome for parents.
ReplyDeleteI was pretty surprised when you brought up the possibility for abuse, but now that I see it clearly, it's a pretty serious possibility. I think it's probably dangerous enough to make it not even worth the extra safety would provide in the first place. I think problems like these sneak under the radar when people are thinking of innovative ideas, and only surface after the product has been announced. We need to keep a better eye on this type of thing.
Google Latitude: This technology also seems pretty cool, and it seems like it has good privacy features. The main concern, as you brought up is that the information is completely unreliable. The interesting thing is, however, that the information is made unreliable because of the privacy features. This brings up the question as to what a good balance between privacy and functionality really is.
Good finds of things to report on
ReplyDeleteMinor technical thing: Blogger has a way to put links in as links so people can just click on them. See the little link icon in the bar at the top of the edit window. (although it doesn't seem to let me do that in a comment)
You say “perhaps GPS tracking their kids isn't the best idea” and it’s good to look at the issues. I’m not sure about your specifics. I think it’s safe to assume that in general, unless someone has kidnapped the kid, they won’t have access to hacking the phone. I suppose they could get a kid to hand it to them, but it isn’t clear what they could do in that context. I also assume that the tracking data is sent back through the phone system to the parents, not broadcast in some way. So nobody else could use it to locate the kid unless they tapped the parent’s phone or computer. Also I’m not sure about the “distance between child and parents” since there is no provision for tracking the parents.
So the risks tend to be in situations where someone has “snatchd the kid off the streets”, in which case it’s already a pretty bad situation (and a very rare one). What are the realistic chances of the problems?
There does seem to be a technology issue, which is that GPS doesn’t work well indoors. Maybe they keep track of the last reading, so if it loses touch with the satellites at least you know where they went into the building. This wouldn’t work for things like finding them in a shopping mall (which would be a useful thing to have).
Latitude, of course, raises many more issues since there isn’t the tight parent/small child link. You have laid out some of them well.
These have been studied in depth.
See Towards a scalable model for location privacy
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1503412
and Developing privacy guidelines for social location disclosure ...
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1073008
By Ian Smith and his Intel group.
In regards to the Wherifone and the possibility of pedophiles hacking into the GPS system and snatching children, I think there is a relatively low chance of such an attempt being successful. Mainly, if a GPS is hacked, it would probably be easy to trace the source of the hack. Additionally, I feel that if a child where to be kidnapped or such having such a GPS on them would be a great help in finding the lost or kidnapped child (of course this would be if the kidnapper does not know that the child has the GPS cell phone). So, although it is true that a child GPS cell phone could potentially be used for harm, I still think that the benefits outweigh the possible costs
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