Public Whereabouts

A.Woodbury here..

I came across an article in the New York Times today called 'It's tracking your every move and you may not even know'. It's about a guy, Malte Spitz, that took his cellphone company to court in order to find out how exactly much location information the company had about him. The results were astonishing as the company saved his GPS coordinates more than 35,000 times in a six-month period. This is insane to think about since we do an extraordinarily large amount of things within this time period and to think that a company knows exactly what we're up to is a bit scary.

The idea of sharing our location isn't a completely absurd thing to some people as millions of people do it everyday on convenient apps such as Google Latitude, Foursquare, Facebook, etc. A very large amount of people are comfortable with others. Most of these services have the user's whereabouts shared, but with a few perimeters. First off, a person needs to have the corresponding application in order to view your location. Next, often times someone needs to add you as a friend in order to view exactly where you are. Lastly, and above all, it is up to the user to post the location information in the first place.

This news about the cell phone company is especially shocking because it is not up to the owner of the cell phone to share his/her location, that's fully up to the company. "Every seven seconds or so, the phone company of someone with a working cellphone is determining the nearest tower, so as to most efficiently route calls. And for billing reasons, they track where the call is coming from and how long it has lasted" This explains why, but doesn't explain why if you catch my drift.

Knowing our location helps route our calls, but is this the end of privacy as we know it? Some may say this information isn't being shared by the company so it's all good, but how would we know? Would the company really email us when our location has been shared with an outside source? I think not. Welcome to our future.