Pirate's Cove

Leave it to the NY Times-which also has an op-ed today calling the President a criminal-to completely miss the point

Two new questions arise, courtesy of the latest advancement in cellphone technology: Do you want your friends, family, or colleagues to know where you are at any given time? And do you want to know where they are?

Obvious benefits come to mind. Parents can take advantage of the Global Positioning System chips embedded in many cellphones to track the whereabouts of their phone-toting children.

But such services point to a new truth of modern life: If G.P.S. made it harder to get lost, new cellphone services are now making it harder to hide.

“There is a Big Brother component,” said Charles S. Golvin, a wireless analyst at Forrester Research. “The thinking goes that if my friends can find me, the telephone company knows my location all the time, too.”

In reality, the headline of the story-Privacy Lost: These Phones Can Find You-fails to match the story, but, it sure looks good to the nutballs who read and believe everything the Times writes, particularly if they are thinking that GPS tracking in wireless devices will lead to a loss of actual privacy.

In reality, the people who use these phones are voluntarily giving up their privacy to their friends and coworkers. There is no Big Brother component. I seriously doubt whether the wireless companies or government care if you are going to the mall, seeing a movie, or going to a strip club.

If people do not want to be tracked, turn it off. Problem solved.

But it is a good technology when used correctly, as the article does point out, to help us track our children, friends, and even a parent with Alzheimers.

But, you didn’t think I post this simply to highlight a wee bit of NY Times hysteria, did you?

• And keep in mind the telephone companies will turn this information over to the government in a New York minute
• I can better see the beginnings of a police state with more people being both watcher and watched
• And just wait until we find out that the Bush administration has been spying on the information telephone companies have been gathering on where people go, not just who they’re talking to … The government could really invade your privacy with this …
• How long will it be before the NSA and the FBI has this service being used to track people they think are dangerous? How long will it be before the NSA “compels” the phone companies to give them the information stored in the services?
• How many cellphones already have GPS chips embedded? So this means that not only the NSA and the FBI, but any government worldwide can potentially locate a cell phone user just by contacting the phone company? That’s upsetting.
• We give up our civil liberties with pleasure, so why not our privacy? It seems like a logical next step in the clampdown.
• It’s irrelevant soon enough we will all have subdermal chips implanted that track us. They will tell us (parents) its for our own safety, it’s for our kids’ safety. Then they will tell us they aren’t using the information against us. Then they will tell us that the people they have tried in their secret courts and incarcerated in their secret jails are suspected of future crimes. They will tell us its better this way. They will tell us we’re happier this way. We will be believe them, and then they will start charging us for the service. But most of all we will believe them.

There are severl more comments, but that last one is a pip! The mind of liberal. I think they have had too many Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters.

To be fair, there were also plenty of comments about how useful this technology is, and that you are really not giving up privacy so much as being social, and protecting your kids and even parents.

Do I have one? Nope. Not part of the service I subscribe to. Will I get one? Nope. Do not see a need for it myself. Parents are in good shape and I have no kids. But, I see no downside to it, except if one creates one, such as letting a wife/girlfriend see one go into a strip club.