The Global Positioning System (GPS) has been available since the 1980s but it wasn't until the turn of this century that the acronym became more of a common household term. Initially, GPS receivers were the size of backpacks or larger, making business or consumer use of GPS technology impractical and expensive. In addition, it was not until Desert Storm proved the value of GPS that the satellite constellation was fully deployed. Because of that, for many years, GPS was used primarily for military purposes and most consumers didn't think twice about the personal benefits of this technology.
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By HP Jin
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Now that the evolution of the technology has led to mainstream use, such as devices for outdoor activities, personal navigation or locating family members, some people have raised concerns over the potential impact on personal privacy. And with GPS moving into mobile phones, something that we always have with us, these conversations are becoming even more common, and privacy concerns are growing. As innovation continues, we in the wireless industry have a responsibility to ensure that we listen to and address these customer concerns - especially privacy.
Big Brother - Just a Big Myth
Despite what many consumers think, Big Brother is not always watching what you are doing or where you are going. Like many evolving technologies, the fear of GPS stems from a lack of understanding of how it works. We can alleviate this fear through education as there are some basic fundamentals of wireless GPS services that can be explained fairly easily to customers.
Most importantly, it is critical to make the distinction between using GPS to gather location-based information for your own personal use versus using GPS to locate another individual.
Locating Yourself
Personal GPS use would apply with applications such as navigation, outdoor recreation and local business search. These are services that customers control individually, can only be used on his/her phone and are opt-in applications. Location information cannot be shared automatically with others just because one or more of these GPS services are enabled on a mobile device.
In emergency cases, it is important to remember the limitations of these services because of this inability to automatically allow tracking by others. If someone becomes lost, for example, GPS services that he/she has subscribed to on the phone will not provide any additional support for others to locate this person. However, the GPS chip itself may be useful. In this instance, emergency responders, using the E911 infrastructure, would work closely with the respective wireless carrier to try to approximately locate it via recent calls made from the phone. While not as precise as GPS, wireless tower triangulation also may be used for narrowing down a location. The location information, whether using GPS or wireless triangulation, is only obtainable to first responders or through official court processes in order to protect the customer's privacy. However, all of this becomes much more difficult if the person has moved out of wireless coverage or turned off the phone, as the last calls made from the phone may not be near the actual current location.
If you are the person lost, some GPS applications in this category may provide you with the ability to determine your latitude and longitude. Unfortunately, if you are immobile or unable to navigate your way around, this may only be helpful if you have communication capabilities so that you can share the location with rescuers.
Locating Others
Recently, companies have launched services that allow customers to share their location with other mobile phones users or make it viewable online. Most companies providing these services have built in permissions and security options so that location information is fully controlled by the customer and they have to manually and explicitly specify recipients and share the location.
Other services now allow family members or business managers to track the location of their loved ones or mobile workers, respectively. In the case noted above with the missing person, a tracking service would make it much quicker and easier to find the location of the phone as long as the phone is in wireless coverage area and not turned off. In many instances, this technology has helped save lives, find missing family members, and helped companies better manage dispatch and communication with mobile fleets. Because of this, tracking via these mobile GPS services has increased in popularity in the past year or two.
To address privacy concerns, most companies providing these services have incorporated options that allow the mobile customer to set permissions for tracking and security. The ability to track is limited to the owner of the wireless account and only phones on this account can be monitored. If the owner would like to allow another person, say a babysitter (in the case of the family) or a dispatcher (in the case of a business) to track the phone, a user name and password must be shared to access this information.
Protecting Customers' Privacy
The most important step we can take to ensure our customers' privacy regarding GPS technology is to provide as much information as possible on how the technology works. This can be done via related Websites, brochures, at the point of sale, or through customer care. We also should encourage customers to ask specific questions when they are considering GPS applications so they find the right fit for their individual needs.
Most companies developing or offering GPS applications have expanded efforts to address privacy concerns. However, as the number of mobile phones with built-in GPS increases, it is more important than ever that we maintain these high standards and continue to communicate effectively with customers when it comes to addressing privacy concerns.
Jin is president, CEO and co-founder of TeleNav.