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Snoopy cellphones
Jamie Doward
 TECHNOLGOY
that lets companies find out if employees are really where they
claim to be sparks concerns over civil liberties.
Picture the scene. You
are supposed to be attending a sales conference in Crewe when you
are woken from your slumbers by the ringtone from your
company-issued mobile phone. "I’m there now," you lie to
your boss from the comfort of your hotel bed, safe in the knowledge
that she will never know otherwise.
But, alas, your mobile
phone uses a new technology that means your boss can pinpoint your
exact location. You are soon collecting your cards and handing back
the phone.
It is the stuff of
slackers’ nightmare. But ‘location-based tracking’ to use the
mobile phone industry’s terminology - is about to become reality.
Mobile-phone networks will soon be able to pinpoint the precise
location of a handset owner to within 10 metres or less. From the
middle of next year many phones will carry Global Satellite
Positioning chips, while another new technology, known as ‘Triangulation’,
can pinpoint a mobile-phone user’s whereabouts by bouncing signals
off three phone masts to establish an exact set of coordinates.
The concept has
already been warmly embraced by a number of firms. But the move has
sparked huge controversy among civil liberty groups who fear that
mobile-phone companies will be able to play Big Brother. ‘It’s a
very worrying development. The scope for the misuse of this
technology is enormous,’ Barry Hugill, spokesman for the British
civil liberties group Liberty told GNS.
Some experts are
worried that firms might make it a condition of an employee’s job
specification that they
give their consent for their phone to be tracked. Other pro-privacy
campaigners go as far as to argue that the technology is part of a
wider, more sinister trend to surveillance.
The mobile-phone
networks believe the location- based tracking services — which
will allow firms to target specific customers when they enter
designated locations — will become a major marketing weapon in the
future.
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