#62 - Big Brother in the Sky

Ah the power of the GPS! Since the technology of Global Positioning System (GPS) have shrunk to one chip, those chips have been ending up everywhere. We first saw them in General Motors Cars - The famous OnStar system uses GPS to locate where your car is. GPS chips are also in some cellular telephones and even watches that you can give your kids. Many companies are giving their employees cell phones that feed back to a company web site where the employees are.Now the city of New York is proposing to put GPS in all 13,000 city taxicabs. Of course the cabbies aren't real impressed. A manager could see where they take their breaks, when they take their breaks and the paths they use to deliver a client to his destination. The New York Fire Department is working with the Department of the Navy to develop a super GPS chip that can be placed on each of their fireman and in every fire department vehicle. The 9/11 tragedies of lost firemen have led to that effort.

We love our Garmin GPS that we use in the car. It is a one way GPS in that it can only receive signals not send them. So I can run around the Alleghany Highlands without being tracked. However I'm not sure whether my cell phone has a GPS so that may not be true. Police who use a cell phone's GPS to track a 911 caller can attest to its positive attributes. I haven't seen a criminal case where a perpetrator is tracked by his cell phone or car. But you know it will happen. To my knowledge there aren't any laws on the books yet regulating GPS usage.

So how soon will it be before we are all trackable? And will we allow the tracking to be legal? You can get an awful lot of personal information by knowing where a person is all the time. Big Brother is already watching some of the time.

Tomorrow we'll look at the technology behind GPS.