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?
A phone with Buddy Beacon, a tracking service offered by Helio,
a mobile phone service provider.
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.
“Two hundred students all pulled out their cellphones, called someone and
said, ‘Where are you?’ ” he said. “People want to connect.”
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.
“There are massive changes going on in society, particularly among young
people who feel comfortable sharing information in a digital society,” said
Kevin Bankston, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation based in
San Francisco.
“We seem to be getting into a period where people are closely watching each
other,” he said. “There are privacy risks we haven’t begun to grapple with.”
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. “People don’t have to ask ‘Where
are you?’” 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.
“I don’t know if I’d want my mom knowing where I was all the time,” 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 Alzheimer’s. 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.
“There is a Big Brother component,” said Charles S. Golvin, a wireless
analyst at Forrester
Research. “The thinking goes that if my friends can find me, the telephone
company knows my location all the time, too.”
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&T’s
wireless unit, “that is a negative for us.” Loopt and similar services say they
do not keep electronic records of people’s 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 person’s viewing ability is
disabled.
Clay Harris, a 25-year-old freelance marketing executive in Memphis, says he
uses Helio’s 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.
“He had tried to reach me, but I didn’t hear my phone ring,” Mr. Harris said.
“He just showed up and I thought, ‘Wow, this is great.’”
He would never think to block Mr. Lotz. But he would think twice before
inviting a girlfriend into his social-mapping network. “Most definitely a girl
would ask and wonder why I was blocking her,” he said.
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