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Nevermind Big Brother. Meet Little Brother: The Omniscience of GPS.
The old adage about the three elements to retail business success—location, location, location!—have been adopted by the mobile handset world. Location is this year's mobile Web.
Carriers want to build location into phones because they can then sell you services that leverage location, license your location information to marketers to push ads at you, or allow application developers to write software that uses location, thus improving software revenues (which carriers often get a cut of).
For you, you get a handset that can help you get out of a jam, or simply find a place to eat or get gas. GPS (Global Position System) receivers have long been embedded in many cell phones, all those sold by Verizon and Sprint for years, because of an FCC mandate for emergency call location (E911 or Enhanced 911). While the mandate has a lot of squishy parts to it, providing a reasonably but not perfectly accurate location to a 911 operator, akin to what a wired telephone line can offer, is key to it.
The GPS hardware in phones remained mostly of theoretical interest for the early 2000s until handset processing power and GPS chip sensitivity improved enough to allow services like turn-by-turn navigation on a phone, or rapid start-up location with maps.
Even though the iPhone seemingly was the first in every category in which it has a feature checked off, GPS was old hat before the iPhone arrived. Sprint in particular had focused on providing good GPS support, and building it in to all its mobile broadband products for laptop users, as well as many smartphones.
What made Apple's packaging unique is that it was the first smartphone maker to use multiple methods to produce a best-combined-effort set of coordinates you were at. (Other handsets would either use cellular network information, such as trilaterating towers or sending GPS data to a network server to process, or would rely entirely on a built-in GPS chip.)
Apple added location in early 2008, before it released an iPhone with built-in GPS, using a combination of cell-phone tower data—because each phone has to grab and constantly update a list of nearby cell phones that are uniquely numbered—and Wi-Fi information.
The Wi-Fi data is provided by Skyhook Wireless, a firm that's been driving the streets and byways of cities all over the world for years, passively scanning Wi-Fi network identifiers and recording that data paired with high-quality GPS signals. This allows them, when an iPhone or other device sends a "snapshot" of Wi-Fi signals around itself, to calculate a fairly precise latitude and longitude, often with about 30 feet in urban areas.
GPS receivers work poorly in urban areas in which buildings block good satellite reception. There are a few dozen GPS satellites rapidly whirling around the globe in precise patterns, but if your device can't get signals from 3 or 4, you can't get a good fix. However, if you have a little cell tower info, some Wi-Fi signals, and a couple GPS satellites' position, you can be nailed down quite exactly. (When I've tested this with my new iPhone 3GS, it sometimes shows me at the exact part of the house I'm standing in when zoomed in at the full map detail level. Creepy.)
Apple went a step further with the latest release of its iPhone OS software, version 3.0, adding an option for any iPhone or iPod touch to report its position constantly to aid in recovery if stolen or lost. The Find My iPhone and Find My iPod touch feature requires a $99 per year (list price) MobileMe subscription from Apple, which includes email, photo hosting, and other features.
Many cell carriers also offer family finder features. Give a cell phone to your son or daughter—or wife, husband, or elderly and failing parent—and you can know where they are at all times, unless the phone is powered off.
This kind of feature makes people feel all oogy inside. It's one thing to have Big Brother tracking you, and location data can be used for that purpose. But Big Brother has long had access with and without subpoena's to use cell-tower information and even remotely access phone data to track people's whereabouts.
No, these new services can be a bit about both Little Brother, the omniscience of those around you, and about the unintentional exposure of your location. Many services now tag various things you do with location if you give permission. (All the phones that track location only tag stuff with coordinates if you say yes. But if you've said once yes, you often don't need to give permission again, and could easily forget.)
Geotagging is now old hat, where coordinate tags are added to embedded metadata in a photograph--the bits of data that describe characteristics of the image, rather than the bits that make up the image itself. If you told your boss, lover, husband, or parents you were in one place, but uploaded a string of pictures maybe even automatically that put pins on a map of where and when you were at, trouble lies ahead.
Stories already abound of domestic abusers, stalkers, and private detectives using cell phones or GPS trackers to keep tabs on people without their permission. The expansion and ease of such services makes these uses increasingly likely.
There are certainly those who say that this kind of information has the converse ability to be a lifesaver. We've had a spate of lost loved ones in the Seattle area in the last few years: cases in which otherwise seemingly fully functional adults disappear, some permanently.
When Tom Rider tried to track down his wife Tanya after she hadn't returned home from her department store job in 2007, he couldn't get King County's sheriffs interested in tracking her down, in part due to a misunderstanding over the use of an ATM card associated with a joint account. The Sheriff's Office thought she'd just taken off.
Tom Rider was eventually seen as a suspect, which allowed law enforcement to get a warrant for his wife's phone records, which in turn led them to find her quickly where her car had gone off the road. She was in extremely serious condition. Tom Rider later lobbied for an easier way for people to pre-authorize law enforcement to gain access in missing-person and similar cases.
Had Tom and Tanya subscribed to a family tracking service, he could have found her location, driven out there, and called an ambulance hours instead of days after her crash.
Knowing where you are is a boon to getting around; knowing where someone else is could either save their life or be a horrible violation of their trust.
Carriers want to build location into phones because they can then sell you services that leverage location, license your location information to marketers to push ads at you, or allow application developers to write software that uses location, thus improving software revenues (which carriers often get a cut of).
For you, you get a handset that can help you get out of a jam, or simply find a place to eat or get gas. GPS (Global Position System) receivers have long been embedded in many cell phones, all those sold by Verizon and Sprint for years, because of an FCC mandate for emergency call location (E911 or Enhanced 911). While the mandate has a lot of squishy parts to it, providing a reasonably but not perfectly accurate location to a 911 operator, akin to what a wired telephone line can offer, is key to it.
The GPS hardware in phones remained mostly of theoretical interest for the early 2000s until handset processing power and GPS chip sensitivity improved enough to allow services like turn-by-turn navigation on a phone, or rapid start-up location with maps.
Even though the iPhone seemingly was the first in every category in which it has a feature checked off, GPS was old hat before the iPhone arrived. Sprint in particular had focused on providing good GPS support, and building it in to all its mobile broadband products for laptop users, as well as many smartphones.
What made Apple's packaging unique is that it was the first smartphone maker to use multiple methods to produce a best-combined-effort set of coordinates you were at. (Other handsets would either use cellular network information, such as trilaterating towers or sending GPS data to a network server to process, or would rely entirely on a built-in GPS chip.)
Apple added location in early 2008, before it released an iPhone with built-in GPS, using a combination of cell-phone tower data—because each phone has to grab and constantly update a list of nearby cell phones that are uniquely numbered—and Wi-Fi information.
The Wi-Fi data is provided by Skyhook Wireless, a firm that's been driving the streets and byways of cities all over the world for years, passively scanning Wi-Fi network identifiers and recording that data paired with high-quality GPS signals. This allows them, when an iPhone or other device sends a "snapshot" of Wi-Fi signals around itself, to calculate a fairly precise latitude and longitude, often with about 30 feet in urban areas.
GPS receivers work poorly in urban areas in which buildings block good satellite reception. There are a few dozen GPS satellites rapidly whirling around the globe in precise patterns, but if your device can't get signals from 3 or 4, you can't get a good fix. However, if you have a little cell tower info, some Wi-Fi signals, and a couple GPS satellites' position, you can be nailed down quite exactly. (When I've tested this with my new iPhone 3GS, it sometimes shows me at the exact part of the house I'm standing in when zoomed in at the full map detail level. Creepy.)
Apple went a step further with the latest release of its iPhone OS software, version 3.0, adding an option for any iPhone or iPod touch to report its position constantly to aid in recovery if stolen or lost. The Find My iPhone and Find My iPod touch feature requires a $99 per year (list price) MobileMe subscription from Apple, which includes email, photo hosting, and other features.
Many cell carriers also offer family finder features. Give a cell phone to your son or daughter—or wife, husband, or elderly and failing parent—and you can know where they are at all times, unless the phone is powered off.
This kind of feature makes people feel all oogy inside. It's one thing to have Big Brother tracking you, and location data can be used for that purpose. But Big Brother has long had access with and without subpoena's to use cell-tower information and even remotely access phone data to track people's whereabouts.
No, these new services can be a bit about both Little Brother, the omniscience of those around you, and about the unintentional exposure of your location. Many services now tag various things you do with location if you give permission. (All the phones that track location only tag stuff with coordinates if you say yes. But if you've said once yes, you often don't need to give permission again, and could easily forget.)
Geotagging is now old hat, where coordinate tags are added to embedded metadata in a photograph--the bits of data that describe characteristics of the image, rather than the bits that make up the image itself. If you told your boss, lover, husband, or parents you were in one place, but uploaded a string of pictures maybe even automatically that put pins on a map of where and when you were at, trouble lies ahead.
Stories already abound of domestic abusers, stalkers, and private detectives using cell phones or GPS trackers to keep tabs on people without their permission. The expansion and ease of such services makes these uses increasingly likely.
There are certainly those who say that this kind of information has the converse ability to be a lifesaver. We've had a spate of lost loved ones in the Seattle area in the last few years: cases in which otherwise seemingly fully functional adults disappear, some permanently.
When Tom Rider tried to track down his wife Tanya after she hadn't returned home from her department store job in 2007, he couldn't get King County's sheriffs interested in tracking her down, in part due to a misunderstanding over the use of an ATM card associated with a joint account. The Sheriff's Office thought she'd just taken off.
Tom Rider was eventually seen as a suspect, which allowed law enforcement to get a warrant for his wife's phone records, which in turn led them to find her quickly where her car had gone off the road. She was in extremely serious condition. Tom Rider later lobbied for an easier way for people to pre-authorize law enforcement to gain access in missing-person and similar cases.
Had Tom and Tanya subscribed to a family tracking service, he could have found her location, driven out there, and called an ambulance hours instead of days after her crash.
Knowing where you are is a boon to getting around; knowing where someone else is could either save their life or be a horrible violation of their trust.
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