The GPS and Our Privacy
February 2, 2012 – 12:31 am
This week’s topic in info3pt0 is the challenge we face as a society in retaining privacy while adopting useful new technologies, specifically the GPS in this case. The class brings up two articles and asks the question if we as a society ought to increase or decease our usage of location based technology.
GPS was intended as a military product from the start, allowing the US military to achieve pinpoint precision when planning and coordinating. It was soon declassified for civilian use and now serves as an extremely reliable source of highly accurate location information. So accurate that it often seems like my phone knows where I am to a higher degree of accuracy than even I do.
Since then, the market has been saturated with GPS enabled products from navigational devices to tablets and cell phones, its hard to find a household that does not own some sort of GPS these days. This begs the question, when does location awareness become too involved?
The articles assigned for class bring up the fact that GPSs have both beneficial and some down right creepy uses. From safely navigating a storm at sea to stalking, the GPS certainly does have a wide range of uses however there is really no way to limit society’s utilization of this tech. The market has already been saturated and its unlawful for the government to restrict who can own a GPS or what they can use it for. Therefore the burden of privacy falls on us, the individual. We are transitioning to an open society, something argued by many high profile tech leaders as mentioned in “Privacy: One Step Backward?” This is unfortunate mostly because many young people are naive and do not think they need to protect themselves, and many older people do not know how.
So where am I going with this? The original question was “Do the benefits of the technology outweigh the risks?” One just needs to look around and see that society clearly believes the benefits of knowing where you are outweigh the risks of someone else potentially knowing the same information (Otherwise they wouldn’t spend hundreds on the tech). Without GPS no only would we have to try and use maps while driving again but airplanes and boats would have to use the starts and less accurate INS systems for navigation. Our smart bombs would lose considerable accuracy and put more lives in danger than intended and overzealous parents wouldn’t be able to track their children’s driving speeds.
Now that we love our GPSs, how do we go about being safe with them? My answer for most of the world’s problems is the same; Education. Once people know what is at risk how to protect themselves, they will not be taken advantage of. A perfect example of this is Google’s Latitude service. Many people don’t know that their Androids and iPhones can be used by Google friends to track your location on a map. Its a perfect tool for parents spouses etc, but at the same time its creepy as hell. An ignorant user who accepts and enables everything on their phone may end up showing their not so good friend, Marc, that they are out of the house at a particular time providing him with all the information he needs to rob their house. If our poor friend just read some things before accepting them, or educated himself about the subject he could have avoided the situation easily.
Granted, this does not account for unlawful stalking and those overzealous parents we talked about, aside from banning the technology there is not much we as a society can do to prevent these unethical uses. However this is the problem we face with any new tech. You can’t ban the camera because it has the potential to take unethical or illegal photos, why would you do that to the GPS? With the good comes the bad.
References:
http://www.thenewstribune.com/2012/01/30/2004703/personal-use-of-gps-trackers-growing.html
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/01/25/privacy-one-step-forward/
Google Latitude: https://www.google.com/latitude/b/0
