One such that I spotted recently was a statement made in February by a Mr Wayne Leuck, vicepresident

1

• One such that I spotted recently was a statement
  made in February by a Mr Wayne Leuck,
  vice-president of engineering at USWest, the
  American phone company. Arguing against the
  deployment of high speed wireless connections, he
  said, Granted, you could use it in your car
  going sixty miles an hour, but I dont think too
  many people are going to be doing that. Just
  watch. Thats a statement that will come back to
  haunt him. Satellite navigation. Wireless
  Internet. As soon as we start mapping physical
  location back into shared information space, we
  will trigger yet another explosive growth in
  Internet applications.

Douglas Adams, 1999, Independent on Sunday,
reprinted in The Salmon of Doubt, 2002, p103.
2
Who knows where you are?

• by
• Pete Fisher
• Department of Geography, University of Leicester

3
Assumptions

• Technology knows where you are
• BUT
• Who should have access to that information?

4
Third Party Applications

• Emergency Response
• Fleet Monitoring
• Tagging
• Geoslavery?

5
We want them to know

• You are injured at X
• You cannot move
• You phone an ambulance but pass out
• The operator / dispatcher knows where you are
• You are successfully rescued

6
They have a right to know

• Fleet Monitoring
• Spy in the cab
• Taciograph
• Car rental ?
• Once the rental has expired
• Delivery services ?
• Sales team ??
• Employees ???

7
Abusive Relationships

• Abuser subscribes partners phone to a locator
  service
• Insists on her using it at all times
• Abused partner wishes to leave
• He can find her at any time she is using the
  phone
• And he can intimidate her into keeping it
  switched on

8
Safe Houses

• Will be able to track her movements!
• See the places she has been
• Infer the people she has talked to
• Safe Houses for abuse victims are no longer safe

9
Solutions

• Simple
• Thrown away the phone
• But not if it is locked on
• But how many abused partners know that?
• Give rapid judicial intervention
• It must take less than an hour to deny a
  subscriber access to the locations of their list
  of numbers

10
Geoslavery

• Link LBS with
• A negative stimulation device
• Electric shock
• Sharp needle
• And a GIS
• executing point in polygon searches
• You can control people

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Sweatshops

• You can keep them in particular areas (polygons)
• Exploitative factory owners in less developed
  areas can now confine workers to their factories
• They get a negative stimulus if they go outside
  the area
• WanderAlert Digital AngelTM

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• It was there in my hand. Real. Sharp.
• Sharp enough to cut the tracer out of my wrist.
  To make escape a possibility .
• Well, I did it. Only one in ten thousand gets
  out of the Dormitories, according to Shade. Most
  cant find anything to cut the tracer out or
  dont have wits to disable it in some other way.
  
• Even when they do find something sharp, most
  dont have the guts to slice open their own
  wrist, to reach in and pull the capsule out from
  where it nestles

Garth Nix, 1997, Shades Children.
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Summary

• Privacy of Location is not guaranteed in any
  Privacy-related legislation
• Digital records should be covered by the Data
  Protection Act
• Mobile phone companies should be registered under
  the act
• There is no longer privacy of location

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The Heart of the Problem

• Other than operators Who should have access to
  personal location information?