Lost? Hiding? Your Cellphone Is Keeping Tabs triumphantly announces NYT in its quite interesting if a little eery article. While parents watching their children is a function of this technology that is a little obsessive (and probably somewhat damaging for the said children's sense of independence) it is inconsequential. The potential for abuse of this information is absolutely fantastic.
The most impressive thing about this, is that it is impossible to turn it off on your phone. Mine, for example, allows me to choose between a "location On" option and a "911 Only" option. I realize the concept of "help and safety" being employed here, but what if I simply don't want to be saved in return for my ability to retain the relative anonymity of my location. This world is already too small for comfort. So under the guise of worry and care comes the discomfort of surveillance by private individuals of private individuals. The law is unclear on the topic, but business is not - surveillance is money. Of course, advocates of the technology will always point to safety benefits, which, most certainly, comes at a price of freedom and privacy in this case. Is it worth it?
Yes, Howard Rheingold (via scott) has some insightful musings about this concept, yet he seems woefully behind the times. For one, he is speaking in future tense about this! "Are we going to be walking around?". Howard, we already ARE walking around with location aware devices.
At the advent of the Internet, the academia was enamoured with the possibilities - oh the anonymity, oh the ability to play out different selves, oh the freedom, oh the convenience... wait a minute... convenience? Most academics are only now catching on - the Internet never gave freedom. If anything, it took it away. The Internet killed the concept of privacy and the users and the academics caught on only now... and now is a little too late. Have you ever been to an academic privacy panel? It nearly immediately degenerates into a spam gripe session. The issue though, isn't spam, spam is just a minor manifestation of the bigger problem - what you do on the Internet can be connected to you and the traces are retained forever... Are you ready for this kind of persistence of memory?
And all this really comes down to is choice. In this case we are not even given a choice whether to receive location specific advertising, to allow someone else (911 included!) to track our location, to consent to email to be sent to us. Most would probably say yes to those questions anyway, but having the choice is the important part. We might not exercise it but we must be given the choice in order to honestly say that we still live in some bastardized version of a "still free" society. Privacy practitioners are split on the definition of privacy - people say one thing, do another, what do they mean by privacy? That definition is simple, I think.
Privacy is the ability to control information about self, its dissemination and its use. That ability should not come at a price of convenience, at a price that forces one to give up the urban contemporary lifestyle. At the moment, if I don't want to give up my privacy, I very well could get out of an urban environment and go live in a cabin in Montana, without telephone, electricity, etc. I would probably have to buy a spool of aluminium and surround my home with it in order to prevent them pesky satellites locating me anyway (sounds a little bit paranoid doesn't it?) Nevertheless, acheiving this kind of privacy is still possible... at the price of giving up my life. That price requires me to have enough resources to finance my dip into oblivion.
This points to another interesting outcome. We are fast approaching the age where privacy is a luxury available to those rich with resources. Since the industrial revolution, a working man could not afford principles. Those were the lot of the well to do, the noble born, the bored intelligencia. Privacy is fast becoming such a principle. It is a frightening concept.
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