Big Brother And GPS Team Up To Form Global Human Monitoring  

In Rhode Island, battered women, stranded sailors, lost hikers and 
others in need of emergency help can dial 911 from a Sprint, Verizon or 
T-Mobile cellphone, and authorities will automatically know where they 
are, thanks to global positioning system technology embedded in their 
phones.  

The only statewide e911 system in the country still has kinks to work 
out, but officials expect Cingular, AT&T and Nextel phones to be 
connected by the end of the year. It's one of many developments that 
experts and analysts are studying closely as location tracking becomes 
the latest business opportunity and battleground for privacy advocates.  

The idea that your boss, parent or spouse can accurately track your 
whereabouts in real time is not some far-fetched vision of Big Brother. 
The technology that makes this possible gets cheaper and smaller 
every day, and many devices are already on the market.  

''The big difference in the last year or so is that the technology has 
finally [become] small enough and cheap enough and, more importantly, 
low-power enough that you can start to track a whole slew of different 
things,'' said Roger Hayward, chief technology officer of Axiom 
Navigation, a Costa Mesa, Calif., company that makes wireless GPS 
devices that track vehicles, packages and people.  

''We have customers using almost throw-away devices that would be 
embedded in cardboard shipping boxes, and we're selling devices to 
police departments that are putting them into a variety of police 
vehicles.'' Axiom also sells $120 GPS-enabled battery packs attached 
to a cellphone that allows police officers to be tracked when they're 
out of the vehicle.  

In Palm Beach, a company called Digital Angel expects to launch a 
product this month that uses biosensor, GPS and wireless technology 
to locate missing people and monitor patients, tracking their 
temperature, pulse and other medical conditions. The company is also 
targeting owners who want to find stolen pets or property and farmers 
who need to manage livestock.  

And in the San Francisco Bay Area, bicyclists and runners have found 
new uses for the small handheld GPS devices more often used by 
boaters and hikers. Menlo Park, Calif., software engineer Tim Pfafman 
straps a small GPS to his bike to monitor his speed and elevation, then 
downloads the information to the Web to track his progress over time. 
Pfafman helped create a company to do this, Softbug.com, which has 
been merged with Axiom Navigation.  

Location tracking is not new. Trucking companies, the Coast Guard and 
the Navy have used Loran-C technology to pinpoint cargo or the location 
of vessels at sea. Lost pets can be returned to their owners thanks to 
implanted chips that respond to a scanning device. But the size and 
accuracy of GPS technology is widening the field of business 
opportunities, from concierge services in your car to cellphones that can 
find friends in the area to new ways of tracking your private ambulance 
fleet or your construction crew.  

''Some of the cool things that are going on are within the medical realm. 
There's a need for monitoring and tracking the elderly. I see more 
applications coming up in fleet management. People are also talking 
about detention centers -- if you're on probation and your truant officer 
is trying to locate you, basically they can find you,'' said Ken Nagai, 
marketing manager for Motorola's Radio Products Division. ``It's 
basically Big Brother is looking down on you.''  

FINDING FRIENDS

Imagine being able to find a lost spouse at the shopping mall, track 
down the jerk who stole your laptop or automatically locate the nearest 
burrito joint when you're in the neighborhood. The potential advantages 
as well as the intrusions on privacy have already caught the attention 
of the Federal Trade Commission, which began bringing together privacy 
experts, advertisers, analysts and e-commerce businesses two years 
ago. Guidelines adopted by the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet 
Association ask companies to clearly inform consumers about the 
collection of location information and not use the information unless 
they have permission.  

But those guidelines don't always apply. A Merced, Calif., man has 
already been reported to authorities by his car. Scott Eugene Knight, a 
former Army recruiter, was convicted for his role in a hit-and-run collision 
last year. Knight was in a new Chevrolet Tahoe when he hit and killed a 
pedestrian but kept going. The car's air bags deployed and its OnStar 
GPS tracking system automatically gave the highway patrol the location 
of the crash.  

And yet, a growing number of people are willing to pay for location 
tracking services in their cars, primarily for emergencies, navigation 
and theft prevention, according to a Jupiter Research survey of 1,961 
online consumers in February.  

The 2.4 million subscribers in the ''telematics'' market are growing at 
about 170,000 a month. Assuming an initial $400 installation fee, 44 
percent of people surveyed were willing to pay for basic services such 
as automatic collision notification and stolen-vehicle tracking. Half 
said they would pay for basic and premium services such as help with 
navigation, business finders and e-mail. And 32 percent were willing 
to pay for basic, premium and luxury services such as concierge services 
and live help with restaurant reservations, said Jupiter automotive 
analyst Julie Ask.  

In Europe, location tracking in cellphones is more widespread, and 
emergency guidelines are more relaxed. Legislators in England have 
considered forcing cellular carriers to use location tracking devices 
in order to prevent cellphone theft. Carriers are more focused on coming 
up with commercial applications using a network-based technology known 
as Enhanced Observed Time Difference (EOTD), in which signals sent 
to a cellphone from three different places produce a triangulation 
effect that helps pinpoint a location.  

But in the United States, companies are still struggling to find the 
right balance between GPS technology and network-based technology. 
GPS technology is more accurate, but also more expensive and doesn't 
always work in dense urban areas. Network-based technology is 
cheaper, but is less accurate and doesn't always work in rural 
areas where there are fewer cell towers.  

FEDERAL STANDARDS

Cingular and AT&T Wireless have recently concluded that EOTD 
technology doesn't meet federal requirements for accuracy, and both 
carriers are likely to face fines for being behind schedule, said Ken 
Hyers, an analyst with Cahners In-Stat Group. On the other hand, AT&T 
Wireless is the first to use location technology for commercial services. 
It has launched a mobile buddy list service called Find Friends. Users 
can see who among their friends or co-workers are nearby, call or send 
text messages to meet up with them, then get directions to a nearby 
restaurant, bookstore or bar.  

Verizon and Sprint are currently focusing on making sure their 911 
networks operate properly -- all carriers are under a federal mandate 
to be able to connect 911 systems with the vast majority of cellphone 
users by 2005.  

''Nextel says they're pretty far along on both emergency uses and plans 
for commercial services, and they're primarily a businessperson's 
carrier,'' Hyers said. 'You're going to see things like `How do I find 
directions to my client sites?' 'How do I track employees?' 'Let's find 
all the members of a work crew, say a construction crew.' ''  

Nextel phones, which operate like walkie-talkies and are often paid 
for by a company, may also help companies get around sticky privacy 
issues, Hyers added.  

But carriers say they have their own incentive not to annoy existing 
customers. ''At the end of the day, if Ma and Pa coffee shop sends out 
coupons and people inadvertently sign up and every time they walk by, 
the coupon comes up on the screen and they get annoyed, they're not 
going to blame the coffee shop,'' said Verizon spokesman Jeffrey 
Nelson. ``They're going to blame us. We're the one who has the 
relationship, and I can assure you we're going to protect that 
relationship.''  

FALSE SENSE OF SECURITY?  

Whether GPS-based location tracking will take off faster among 
cellphone consumers, motorists or businesses is not clear. 
Telecommunications analyst Andrew Seybold at Outlook 4Mobility is 
watching the action in all three arenas. GPS devices such as 
Wherify.com's wristwatch, designed to help nervous parents keep tabs 
on their children, ''scare me to death,'' Seybold said. `It could give 
people a false sense of security. The bottom line is that these things 
work, but not all the time.''  

While emergency 911 networks are not yet ready, except in Rhode 
Island and a handful of other counties, the benefits are clear. In Rhode 
Island, battered women have picked up a cellphone to call police only to 
have it knocked from their hands, said Raymond LaBelle, the executive 
director of the state's e911 system.  

''If you're the victim of a carjacking, you could call from the trunk 
and police would know your whereabouts,'' LaBelle said. Not long ago, 
before the system was in place, an elderly woman came home, got out 
of her car and collapsed on the back stairs leading up to her house. 
``She called us, but she was totally incoherent.  

You listen to that for 10 minutes, it'll tear your heart out. We found 
out later she had expired. You hear things like that and you realize the 
importance of this.''  

Knight Ridder News Service

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Material reproduced for educational and research purposes only.  

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Cheers, Steve..

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