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chicagotribune.com >> Technology
Every step you take, every move you make
It's time for an explicit national
debate on human-tracking that goes far beyond privacy issues
By Jerome E. Dobson, president of the
American Geographical Society and a geography professor at the
University of Kansas
Published February 25, 2005
When public school
students in Sutter, Calif., were ordered to wear radio frequency
identification tags around their necks, the children's parents objected
and the principal backed down. Already, schoolchildren in Osaka, Japan,
are required to carry similar tags tucked into their belongings. The
government of Mexico tracks court officials with RFID tags implanted in
their shoulders. Finland changed its national laws to allow cell-phone
tracking of children. A woman in Kenosha discovered her estranged
husband had hidden a Global Positioning System tracker in her car. All
are current news items.
Once viewed as a futuristic nightmare, human-tracking is now affordable
and available without restriction. For $200, plus a monthly service fee
of $20, anyone can purchase an electronic device that puts George
Orwell's 1984 surveillance technology to shame. They're marketed as
"kid-tracking" devices, though some ads also mention pets and senior
citizens. In vivid shades of doublespeak, one company offers service
plans named "Liberty, Independence and Freedom," but surveillance and
control are their purpose.
At the very least, human-tracking devices will alter relationships
between some parents and children, husbands and wives, employers and
employees more dramatically than any other product emerging from the
information revolution. Ultimately, they offer a new form of human
slavery based on location control. They pose the greatest threat to
personal freedom ever faced in human history.
Whatever legitimate uses there may be--to safeguard a child or
incapacitated adult, for example--abuses will occur. Even full-blown
geoslavery is inevitable: The uncertainty is how many people will
suffer from it--hundreds, thousands or millions.
People welcome GPS receivers for personal navigation, especially for
travel and outdoor recreation. There's much good and certainly no harm
as long as the coordinates go directly to the user and no one else.
Current devices display maps produced by geographic information systems
containing detailed information about businesses, residences and
individuals. Human-tracking devices add radio communication that
reports location data to a service center with its own powerful GIS.
Subscribers pay for the privilege of peeking in at will to check on the
individual being tracked.
After decades of fretting over Orwell's vision, hardly a whimper has
been heard since the devices went on sale. Media attention has focused
entirely on the advertised case: parents of good intention watching
over their own children. Far from critical review, news and talk show
coverage amounts to little more than blind acceptance of manufacturers'
claims.
Will the practice really protect children? Or will it introduce new
risks? How will children react, emotionally and behaviorally, to
constant surveillance and control? Will tracking be confined to
children and incapacitated adults? Or will it become a ubiquitous tool
of control throughout society? Peter F. Fisher, professor of geographic
information science at the University of Leicester and editor of the
International Journal of Geographic Information Science, and I have
raised these and other crucial questions in scholarly journals and
trade magazines, but questioning of any sort is strangely absent
elsewhere.
It's time for an explicit national debate on human-tracking that goes
far beyond privacy, per se. Which applications are acceptable and which
are not? Which will require informed consent, legal proceedings or
medical hearings? Which existing laws must be amended to place
electronic means on a par with traditional means of branding, stalking,
incarceration and enslavement? Should human-tracking companies be
licensed? Should their employees undergo background checks? What other
safeguards are needed?
Initially, the front line will be in the workplace. How will union
leaders value workers' rights with human-tracking as a bargaining chip
in contract negotiations?
None of this debate will happen until citizens become alarmed enough to
educate themselves and demand answers, and it's not clear they will
resist.
At church one recent morning, a fellow member told me how a friend, the
owner of a construction firm, uses GPS-based cell phones to track "his
20 Mexicans." He envied his friend's constant control and hoped to
adopt the technology himself though he has only "three Mexicans of his
own."
That conversation occurred in the oldest church in Kansas, established
by abolitionists who came to make Kansas a free state and thereby
sparked the Civil War. The irony was overwhelming.
The American debate begins in Sutter, Calif.
Copyright ©
2005, Chicago Tribune
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