Imagine for a moment, a society where everyone carries mobile phones with a service like this enabled. Perhaps it's become so commonplace that all new phones have it enabled by default, just like voicemail or picture messaging is today.
We don't need Andy Gates to give us another epistle on the post-privacy society to realise that data-leakage would enable all sorts of commercial entities to get hold of the information about where we are and where we've been.
As it is, Tesco know more about you through your clubcard than the East German security forces knew about their population before the wall came down. Imagine what would happen if they could get their hands on this data to "profile" you further. And that's just the insidious data creep which would allow the big corporates to further bleed you dry (sorry, be helpful in your life).
What about the possibilities of constructing breadcrumb trails for where a person's been? I'll guarantee you that there will be hundreds of differnt Google Mashups allowing you to overlay a map with someone's snail-trail.
Easy to spot patterns in their daily journeys (commutes, friends houses, shopping trips, etc) and frighteningly easy to see the spidery offshoots representing anomalies.
What were you doing at the abortion clinic?
Why did you go to see your ex?
Is that a firm of solicitors you visited yesterday?
It looks like you visited the probation office last week, didn't you?
Have you been going to the pub on the way home?
I told you I didn't like you hanging around with those girls after school
You're spending too long in the cafe on your break, we're going to give you a written warning
It would have been a lovely surprise, but I saw you going into that shop yesterday and realised you must have been getting me one.
This thing could well allow more stealthy corporate intrusion into our daily lives, increasing the stranglehold that big business has over us. It could erode trust and responsibility between families and partners and it could represent a potential abuse between employer and employee making mandatory drug testing look quite normal.
I'm not against the tech - it could have many amazing applications that we've not even thought of. I'm certainly not for stopping it.
The problem with introducing this sort of thing is that it could be used for just as much ill as it could good. We need to be aware of the potential for abuse and regulate it out of the system before we go any further.
But we won't
