"Go Ahead, Just Try to Disappear"
Los Angeles Times (12/27/04) P. A1; Colker, David

Global Positioning System (GPS)-equipped mobile phones and other
devices are rapidly emerging as tools allowing people to track the
whereabouts of truant children, spouses, workers, pets, and others,
but some perceive such technologies as a growing threat to personal
privacy. "When a worker far away knows that every move they make is
monitored by someone--without information about just what they are
doing--it takes on a punitive sense," notes Lancaster University
management professor Lucas Introna. SpyGear Store operator Greg
Shields reports that women who suspect their husbands of philandering
account for 60 percent of his business's geolocation gear sales.

Meanwhile, CMS Worldwide expects the number of new cars equipped with
GPS navigation systems to increase from 3.9 million now to 6.5 million
in 2008. Cell phones with GPS debuted in 2001, when the FCC mandated
that mobile phone carriers equip their handsets with geolocation
technology in order to make 911 emergency calls easier to track;
companies that opted for GPS are expected to have at least 95 percent
of their subscribers converted to GPS phones by the end of next year.
James Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology believes that
the commercial value of location services is so great that such
services would spread even without a federal mandate. Mark Frankel of
the American Association for the Advancement of Science is troubled
about the practice of tracking people without their awareness, even if
it is for their own good; adolescents, for instance, could regard such
a measure as a betrayal. Frankel also argues that privacy plays an
important role in the development of people's personality in their
teens. www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-gps27dec27,0,163095.story 

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Summary should be cited as the source of the information. Copyright
2005, Information Inc., Bethesda, MD.

Source: NLECTC - http://www.nlectc.org/justnetnews/weeklynews.html


Cheers, Steve...

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