Cyberspace Is Surfing You

As Robert S Boyd of Knight Ridder Newspapers discovered, cyberspace can be as interested in you as you are in it ...

WASHINGTON -- For better or for worse, it's rapidly becoming easier for others to know where you are, sometimes 24/7.

Thanks to the explosive spread of wireless technology -- particularly cellphones, car-navigation systems and Global Positioning System (GPS) devices -- parents, employers, detectives and government agents can track your movements, with or without your being aware of it.

Many people don't realize that a cellphone, Blackberry or wireless laptop computer constantly broadcasts its location whenever its power is on, even if a call isn't in progress.

This has led to "a new, unique ability to automatically identify somebody's location," Jed Rice, vice president of Skyhook Wireless, a three-year-old location-system provider in Boston, told some congressional aides last week. "This obviously raises privacy issues."

Indeed, the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Democracy and Technology warned in a February report, "The type of location tracking possible in the 21st century is quite different from anything previously available to government agents."

Widespread wireless

More than 214 million Americans -- two of every three -- are wireless subscribers, according to the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, the wireless trade organization.

In addition, more than 1 million cars and trucks are equipped with on-board location devices, such as the OnStar system available on many General Motors and some Acura and Isuzu vehicles. OnStar provides drivers with navigation maps, handles phone calls and sends signals if vehicles are involved in emergencies.

Several state transportation departments are beginning to monitor wireless devices in moving cars to detect traffic slowdowns and issue advisories to drivers.

Three basic techniques can be used to determine the location of a wireless phone or laptop within about 20 yards:

- GPS compares the timing of radio signals from three or four satellites in space.

- Triangulation collects directional signals from two or three cellphone towers.

- Wi-Fi local area networks track high-frequency radio signals from millions of transmitters in urban areas.

"There are 40 million Wi-Fi access points, 500,000 in downtown Chicago alone," Rice said. "We know where they are, [but] we have no record of who you are. The information is anonymous."

A growing number of companies sell tracking services.

In April, WaveMarket launched a "Family Locator" service that lets a parent pinpoint the location of a child using Sprint or Nextel cellphones.

Sprint sells a "Mobile Locator" service that it says can "monitor employee location in real-time, either singly or within a group, on a zoomable online map."

Trucking companies use GPS technology to track drivers' movements. The boss knows when a driver takes a break, violates the speed limit or departs from his unauthorized route.

John Morris, a privacy expert at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told about a rental-van company that tracked a driver going 80 mph. "They charged him three $150 fines," Morris said.

Sensitive information

In its report, the center acknowledged that location information is valuable for law-enforcement and intelligence purposes.

"With newer technologies, tracking can be done automatically by a remote computer, making it possible for law enforcement to monitor the movements of many more people for longer periods of time," the report said. But it cautioned that tracking "reveals sensitive information about a person that may have no relation to criminal activity."

The federal privacy laws that cover common carriers, which handle traditional telephone calls over landlines, don't cover most wireless communications. Wireless companies set their privacy policies.

"There are no [government] rules that apply to us," Skyhook's Rice said. "We're not a common carrier."

An exception is emergency calls to a 911 number. Federal regulations require that a wireless company be able to locate callers who dial 911 so they can be helped.

Some labor unions and privacy experts have objected to the Big Brother implications of location tracking.

"One might think it does not matter if their employer knows that he goes to Starbucks every morning before work or that they spend Sundays at his girlfriend's house," the National Workforce Institute, a nonprofit training organization in Austin, Texas, said in a recent policy paper.

"If someone has the ability to know the real-time location of a person around the clock," the statement said, "they learn everything about that person, much of which is highly personal and private in nature."