Subject: [NEXTEL-1] They know where you are Cellphones, chips, radio tags are tracking people and things

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2003 19:39:25 -0400

They know where you are Cellphones, chips, radio tags are tracking people and
things 

By David Lagesse
9/8/03 

Just about any parent of a teenager would envy Seattle attorney Pat Char. She can
track her son's whereabouts without even having to make a phone call. All it takes
is a glance at her cellphone. Not long ago, 17-year-old Matt was at ski training
in nearby Redmond. Char watched him make his way from practice, checking as he
crossed the bridge toward home. After seeing that he had arrived safely back in
their neighborhood, she headed out of the office to join the family for dinner.
All because Matt carries a cellphone that broadcasts where it is.

Unknown to many Americans, most of our cellphones are capable of doing the same
thing. Nowadays these ubiquitous little communicators quietly and persistently
signal their location like electronic beacons. It takes sophisticated technology
to find them, and commercial tracking services like the one Char uses are still
uncommon. The real pioneers in location technology are local emergency services.
After a slow start, authorities are putting into place gear to find wireless
handsets, often much more precisely than Char can trail her son -- so that
ambulances, firetrucks, and police can be sent to the right spot when 911 calls
come in from cellphones.

Nabbed
Street-smart phones are only the most pervasive in an emerging wave of new
technologies designed to track us, our cars, and the goods we buy. Authorities are
increasingly using toll tags, those radio transmitters that let drivers fly past
toll gates, to monitor cars along an entire route as a measure of traffic flows.
Major retailers like Wal-Mart are pushing for tiny radio tags on merchandise,
which would let them trace goods in warehouses and, ultimately, all the way to
store shelves. And chips that get coordinates from the military's global
positioning system satellites, already built into some cellphones, may soon be
standard equipment in cars. Many rental cars already have GPS systems, which help
nab customers who speed or travel outside the authorized zone.

The new location technology promises an array of benefits: emergency services that
respond better, real-time driving directions to avoid traffic jams, and
better-stocked store shelves offering cheaper goods. Still, the idea that
cellphones and other goods can be trailed unsettles some people, and analogies to
Big Brother are inevitable. Left unchecked, such technologies "will allow
corporations or the government to constantly monitor what individual Americans do
every day," the American Civil Liberties Union warned in a recent report. Wireless
carriers say their systems only pinpoint callers if they've dialed 911--or if they
have explicitly agreed to be found. But privacy advocates say that the technology
will inevitably generate data that a detective, or an angry spouse's divorce
attorney, will demand in court.

In short, the new phones, tags, and chips will keep you from ever getting lost.
The nagging fear is that they'll let others find you, whether you like it or not.

Yet it's hard to dispute the need for some kind of cellphone tracking. Perhaps
half of all 911 calls now come from cellphones, often in waves. A single accident
on Interstate 75 in Charlotte County, Fla., can spur 20 or 30 cell calls, says
county 911 director Janet Hamilton. "It adds up [when dispatchers] have to ask
every caller where they are," she says. Around the country, an inability to trace
wireless 911 calls has had horrific consequences: a Philadelphia man tortured and
murdered, his ordeal monitored over a cellphone line by helpless dispatchers; the
deaths of four youths lost in the mists of Long Island Sound, pleading for help to
saviors who had no idea where to look. As early as 1996, the Federal
Communications Commission saw the problem emerging. It mandated that by 2005,
wireless carriers develop systems that would tell emergency dispatchers where most
calls originate, to within 50 to 150 meters.

One way companies are satisfying the FCC mandate is by equipping new phones with
GPS chips. When a caller dials 911, the carrier's network tells the phone where to
look for the closest satellites. The phone then returns its precise latitude and
longitude, which the carrier relays to the 911 center. A second approach is to
install gear on cellphone towers that times the arrival of a handset's radio
signal. Tiny differences in the arrival time at three different towers reveal the
phone's position. 

Getting all this to run smoothly isn't easy. In the emergency dispatch center for
Lee County, Fla., a largely urban county on the Gulf Coast, 911 director Matt
Rechkemmer has been working with seven different wireless carriers to bring data
into the center's dispatch system. Five companies now provide locations, each in a
different format. But some data still arrive scrambled--as is apparent when
Rechkemmer tests the system by dialing 911 on a cellphone. He watches as Sue
Rausch, an operator, picks up the call. On a computer screen, she clicks a button
to pull in the caller's latitude and longitude. Up pop the coordinates for a cell
tower some distance from the center--certainly not within the range mandated by
the FCC. "That's been happening all day, and I can't figure out why," Rechkemmer
says.

Similar struggles are taking place around the country. Only 800 of the nation's
6,000 or more 911 call centers can locate at least some callers within the
150-meter mandate. But the rollout is accelerating, analysts say, as the 2005
deadline approaches. The FCC complains that work would move more quickly if
cash-strapped states didn't raid special funds set up for the purpose, which are
supported by taxes on wireless subscribers and are not under the federal
government's control.

Even before the emergency systems are fully up and running, cellphone carriers are
eyeing the commercial potential of "location services." The idea is to profit from
the tracking ability, for example by alerting users to a nearby store having a
sale or--in a widely cited fantasy--sending a Starbucks coupon to customers
passing one of the coffee shops. 

Many early schemes went bust, pushed over the edge by delays in the wireless 911
system, privacy concerns, and common sense. "It'd be more efficient for Starbucks
to have an employee outside just handing out the coupons," says Rob Bittner. But
companies are trying again. Bittner's employer, Kivera, wrote the software behind
"Find Friends," the service that Seattle attorney Char's family is using. It's
offered by AT&T Wireless, the only U.S. carrier so far to jump into location
services. A California company, Wherify, has a related approach. It has developed
GPS bracelets for kids that use cellphonelike technology to send their location in
a text message to parents, on demand. Location services are spreading more rapidly
in Europe, Japan, and even China, where a wireless carrier had a hit during the
SARS epidemic with an offer to alert subscribers if they neared a building plagued
by the disease.

These prospects don't thrill privacy advocates. Congress in 1999 said cellphone
users must give prior authorization before their location can be used for anything
but emergency purposes. "Nobody knows what that really means," says David Sobel of
the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Must a consumer push a button that says
"find me," or can a carrier include the OK in a contract's fine print?

A turnoff
Wireless carriers dismiss the privacy concerns. They say they have no incentive to
harvest the data unless someone wants to use a location service, and they add
that, as a practical matter, capturing the ever changing coordinates of the 145
million wireless subscribers in the United States would stretch the limits of data
storage. Besides, says Travis Larson of the Cellular Telecommunications and
Internet Association, customers are going to turn off their phones if they feel
their privacy is at risk. "And that's bad for our business." 

Sprint, for one, leaves it to customers to turn on the GPS beacon in its phones
for any purpose other than 911 calls, and AT&T customers must specifically
authorize others to track them through its Find Friends service. In the Char
family everyone agrees to be found by others in the family. "It's a quid pro quo,"
says mom Pat. "The kids get a cellphone, and I get a little peace of mind." 

Privacy advocates complain, however, that while the locator function is easy to
control in phones equipped with GPS chips, consumers can't disable systems that
rely on the towers. Companies say that without the user's say-so, these systems
track calls only when triggered by the 911 digits of an emergency call.

Yet critics fear a court order could render such promises moot. While police need
a warrant to listen to phone conversations, the standard for access to location
data appears to be looser, says Michael Altschul, general counsel for the CTIA,
the cellphone trade group. In the past, prosecutors have used crude location data
collected by cell companies -- which tower handled a call, for example -- to
undermine alibis in criminal cases. Stephen Keating of the Privacy Foundation says
he expects the government to find new ways to exploit the more powerful wireless
911 system. "New technology always leads to unintended consequences."

Nothing personal
Allaying such concerns is a challenge for another location-tech initiative: the
511 Driving Times project in San Francisco. Piggybacking on the radio toll-tag
system, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission will soon collect data from
readers deployed along hundreds of miles of highways. The readers will monitor
passing cars to produce traffic reports, which drivers can hear by dialing 511. To
protect privacy, the system will scramble the information so it can't be tied to
specific cars, says project director Michael Berman: "The last thing I want is a
bunch of subpoenas from the FBI or local police." 

As further reassurance, Berman's agency mailed Mylar bags to toll-tag users so
they can opt out of the tracking project by covering their tags between tollgates.
Word is that sitting on the device has the same effect, says Stephen Roberts, a
San Francisco attorney who has written on privacy issues and location data. "I
personally haven't tested if my derriere has the same density as a plastic bag."

In five or 10 years, the car seat itself--or the driver's shoe or sweater--may
also have a chip that can be scanned by nearby readers. The world's largest
retailer, Wal-Mart, created a stir this summer by saying it wanted crates and
pallets of goods arriving at its warehouses in 2005 to carry radio frequency
identification, or RFID, chips. The tags, which broadcast a burst of data when
scanned with a radio signal, store much more detailed information than
conventional bar codes do and can be read from up to 10 feet away. By making goods
easier to identify and trace, the chips could cut waste, theft, and loss and
drastically streamline delivery, says retail consultant Scott Lundstrom of AMR
Research.

The giant chain also floated a more ambitious scheme to implant the chips in
individual consumer products. That way a "smart shelf" in the store could keep
track of goods and call for restocking, for example. Wal-Mart ultimately scotched
the test, although chains abroad are studying the technology, and analysts expect
other U.S. retailers to quietly try the tags in their stores. 

Farmers already use such chips to identify livestock, and pet owners increasingly
tag their dogs and cats. One company is even selling them as implantable IDs for
humans (box). But it will most likely be five years before the chips are
widespread in warehouses and even longer before they appear on retail shelves.
Before that happens, their current cost, about 50 cents, will have to drop to a
fraction of a cent, says Jeff Woods, a retail consultant with the Gartner research
firm. Also, retailers, shippers, and warehouse operators will have to revamp their
systems to benefit from the tags. Nonetheless, "I think there's something huge
here," says Woods. "It's going to have a major impact on retailing over the next
20 years."

Critics worry that chips on clothing, toys, or electronics will expose consumers
to later invasions of privacy--some envision powerful radio gear reading the tags
from a distance to see what's inside a house. One solution might be to disable
them at the checkout counter, although that would keep the technology from
benefiting people at home, says Woods. Refrigerators armed with readers could send
an alert when the milk is getting old, and a washing machine could scan the
clothes in its tub and set the best wash cycle. "Red clothes no longer would bleed
on white clothes," he says. Presto! No more pink underwear.

David Clement of Houston sees more serious benefits to the new era of automated
tracking, which brought an ambulance to his wife when she was incapacitated while
driving across town. Her Chevrolet Suburban came equipped with OnStar, a system
that combines a cellphone with a GPS receiver, with private operators ready to
offer assistance. When his wife became ill and had to pull over with their three
kids in the car, 9-year-old Victoria pushed the OnStar button to summon help. "Up
until then, I'd just thought it was a toy," says Clement. "I'm a believer now." 

Map quest
Location technology won't come into its own as either boon or Big Brother until
some mundane details get sorted out -- such as maps. Rhode Island, for example, is
the only state to have a statewide 911 tracking system fully up and running. Like
every other system, it pinpoints each call by latitude and longitude, but what
emergency teams need to know are street addresses and directions, says 911
director Ray LaBelle. "If I give an ambulance driver latitude and longitude
coordinates, he's going to tell me where to go." Making the translation isn't
easy: Most city maps don't have accurate geographic coordinates. Rhode Island is
buying updated maps but so far has only been able to afford them for about a fifth
of its communities.

In Florida's Lee County, 911 employees themselves have been updating local street
maps. Every workday, a lone employee armed with a GPS receiver drives a few of the
county's thousands of miles of roads, stopping at each intersection to record the
exact coordinates. After eight years, the project is about half finished.

Still, Rhode Island rescued several boaters when their cellphones revealed their
coordinates--the Coast Guard is one emergency responder that does speak latitude
and longitude. And in Lee County, the new capability has at least cut back on
crank calls from teenagers, says Rausch, the 911 operator. Kids often call from
cellphones, she says, thinking it's funny to say they need an ambulance for
something like a paper cut. So Rausch now asks them to stay on the line while she
gets their position. "They quickly hang up, and I suspect don't call anymore," she
says with a smile. 

"Not many people realize that we know where their cellphone is."

An ID Card That You Can Never Lose 

Pets have them; soon products will too. So why not radio tags for people? A
Florida-based company called Applied Digital Solutions is injecting a
rice-grain-size ID chip under the skin of a few willing pioneers, including a
Florida family dubbed the "Chipsons." Acquaintances raised their eyebrows, says
mom Leslie Jacobs, 47. "But people thought pacemakers were weird at first."

Jacobs's husband had cancer, and the family initially wanted to implant his
medical data -- then decided to give chips to Mom and son Derek as well. The FDA
has not yet approved that use of the device, but scores of other people have had
the chips implanted for identity purposes, say company officials. The chips can be
read only from within a few feet, and scanners are rare, making it unlikely that
one will be handy when needed. But company head Scott Silverman says that was also
true for a system widely used for pets and livestock; the scanners are now common
in vet clinics, he says. 

Privacy experts, however, are spooked by the idea that people's personal data
could be scanned without their knowledge. They're even less comfortable with
another Applied Digital Solutions implant, still a prototype, that would include a
global positioning system chip and could be tracked remotely. -David Lagesse 
 http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/030908/tech/8bigbro.htm?track=rss

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