[Infowarrior] - Privacy Lost: These Phones Can Find You

[Richard Forno]

October 23, 2007
Privacy Lost: These Phones Can Find You
By LAURA M. HOLSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/technology/23mobile.html?_r=1&ei=5088&en=d
3be854432e9eb1e&ex=1350878400&oref=slogin&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=
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Two new questions arise, courtesy of the latest advancement in cellphone
technology: Do you want your friends, family, or colleagues to know where
you are at any given time? And do you want to know where they are?

Obvious benefits come to mind. Parents can take advantage of the Global
Positioning System chips embedded in many cellphones to track the
whereabouts of their phone-toting children.

And for teenagers and 20-somethings, who are fond of sharing their comings
and goings on the Internet, youth-oriented services like Loopt and Buddy
Beacon are a natural next step.

Sam Altman, the 22-year-old co-founder of Loopt, said he came up with the
idea in early 2005 when he walked out of a lecture hall at Stanford.

³Two hundred students all pulled out their cellphones, called someone and
said, ŒWhere are you?¹ ² he said. ³People want to connect.²

But such services point to a new truth of modern life: If G.P.S. made it
harder to get lost, new cellphone services are now making it harder to hide.

³There are massive changes going on in society, particularly among young
people who feel comfortable sharing information in a digital society,² said
Kevin Bankston, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation based
in San Francisco.

³We seem to be getting into a period where people are closely watching each
other,² he said. ³There are privacy risks we haven¹t begun to grapple with.²

But the practical applications outweigh the worries for some converts.

Kyna Fong, a 24-year-old Stanford graduate student, uses Loopt, offered by
Sprint Nextel. For $2.99 a month, she can see the location of friends who
also have the service, represented by dots on a map on her phone, with
labels identifying their names. They can also see where she is.

One night last summer she noticed on Loopt that friends she was meeting for
dinner were 40 miles away, and would be late. Instead of waiting, Ms. Fong
arranged her schedule to arrive when they did. ³People don¹t have to ask
ŒWhere are you?¹² she said.

Ms. Fong can control whom she shares the service with, and if at any point
she wants privacy, Ms. Fong can block access. Some people are not invited to
join ‹ like her mother.

³I don¹t know if I¹d want my mom knowing where I was all the time,² she
said.

Some situations are not so clear-cut. What if a spouse wants some time alone
and turns off the service? Why on earth, their better half may ask, are they
doing that?

What if a boss asks an employee to use the service?

So far, the market for social-mapping is nascent ‹ users number in the
hundreds of thousands, industry experts estimate.

But almost 55 percent of all mobile phones sold today in the United States
have the technology that makes such friend-and- family-tracking services
possible, according to Current Analysis, which follows trends in technology.

So far, it is most popular, industry executives say, among the college set.

But others have found different uses. Mr. Altman said one customer bought it
to keep track of a parent with Alzheimer¹s. Helio, a mobile phone service
provider that offers Buddy Beacon, said some small-business owners use it to
track employees.

Consumers can turn off their service, making them invisible to people in
their social-mapping network. Still, the G.P.S. service embedded in the
phone means that your whereabouts are not a complete mystery.

³There is a Big Brother component,² said Charles S. Golvin, a wireless
analyst at Forrester Research. ³The thinking goes that if my friends can
find me, the telephone company knows my location all the time, too.²

Phone companies say they are aware of the potential problems such services
could cause.

If a friend-finding service is viewed as too intrusive, said Mark Collins,
vice president for consumer data at AT&T¹s wireless unit, ³that is a
negative for us.² Loopt and similar services say they do not keep electronic
records of people¹s whereabouts.

Mr. Altman of Loopt said that to protect better against unwelcome prying by,
say, a former friend, Loopt users are sent text messages at random times,
asking if they recognize a certain friend. If not, that person¹s viewing
ability is disabled.

Clay Harris, a 25-year-old freelance marketing executive in Memphis, says he
uses Helio¹s Buddy Beacon mostly to keep in touch with his friend Gregory
Lotz. One night when Mr. Lotz was returning from a trip, Mr. Harris was
happy to see his friend show up unannounced at a bar where he and some other
friends had gathered.

³He had tried to reach me, but I didn¹t hear my phone ring,² Mr. Harris
said. ³He just showed up and I thought, ŒWow, this is great.¹²

He would never think to block Mr. Lotz. But he would think twice before
inviting a girlfriend into his social-mapping network. ³Most definitely a
girl would ask and wonder why I was blocking her,² he said.