Cellphone Surveillance

There has been a spurt of media attention paid to the privacy and surveillance concerns of GPS enabled cellphones:

• GPS Surveillance Creeps into Daily Life (New Standard)
• Cellphone as Tracker: X Marks Your Doubts (New York Times)
• Phone service allows people to track their friends (San Francisco Chronicle)

I don’t have a lot of time to comment right now, but this excerpt from the New Standard article sums up much of my concern:

Koroknay-Palicz also sees long-term consequences of this monitoring.

“If we raise kids with no expectation of privacy, then they’re going to become adults and voters and people of influence in society with no expectation of privacy,” he said. “All the expectations of privacy are going to be eroded by the population of adults who grew up with no privacy and don’t see the problem with trading away privacy.”

Coney of EPIC agreed that parents are buying the “safety and security” sales pitch without evaluating the bigger picture, including who else has access to the tracking data.

“A parent might think this is a means to know where their child is,” Coney told TNS, “but it also may be recorded and retained by the person or the entity that provides the service, and they may use it for their own purposes, because there are no laws out there to… prohibit that from happening.”