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A Delicate Balance
By Jon Gordon, Minnesota Public Radio
March, 2001
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New uses for Web-ready cell phones and palm-top computers on the job, at school, and in rural communities offer greater mobility than ever before, but some of the same features touted by proponents are precisely those raising hackles among critics. Take the ability of mobile phones and other wireless gadgets to pinpoint and broadcast a user's location to within a few feet. That means it'll be easier to find people when they become ill, or get lost in a blizzard. But do people really want marketers and government officials to know where they are at all times?
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He knows that could cause problems.
"I think the issue that will come up is will parents force their teenagers to put it on and teenagers don't want to have it on and be monitored. It's an issue between parents and the family."
Geissler is president and CEO of a South St. Paul company called Digital Angel. It makes a monitoring device by the same name, which will go on sale later this year. The Digital Angel takes the form of a wristwatch, but it has other functions. It can monitor your vital signs, sense if you fall, pinpoint your location with a built-in global positioning system chip, and send all that information in real time over mobile phone networks to another party. It could be used to monitor Alzheimer's patients, people on probation, or even pets.
No one would argue that tracking technology violates a dog's privacy, but the same can't be said for people. Digital Angel itself acknowledged the potential for harm when it abandoned its original plan of making its product implantable, and therefore impossible to turn off or remove easily.
"People are used to having watches and necklaces and things on them," Geissler says. "That's the best way to allow a product to be used like this. It has to be voluntary; you have to be able to turn it off."
It isn't just specialty products like Digital Angel that will know where we are. New federal regulations require that by October, all mobile phones have the ability to send signals pinpointing users locations to within 300 feet. The rule is designed to make it easier for 911 emergency to find people in trouble.
But wireless phone makers want to cash in on location technology by allowing merchants to sell products based on where people are. For example, your mobile phone might ring when you come within a couple-hundred yards of a Starbucks. A voice tells you to 'C'mon down for 50 cents off a mocha frappucino.' Some consumers may like being marketed to in this way, but others say so-called 'location commerce' could lead to a kind of pervasive, wireless spam.
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"They can come up with your pattern. 'Oh, they always walk by the store at 9 a.m.' So what does that mean? Is this just another place where others can get access to that information and piece together the pattern of your day?" Pierce wonders.
Pierce says anyone who wants a location database could buy it, meaning it's possible for others to know were you are all the time.
"That's something that in this society we've never done before. We pride ourselves on having a free and open society, and I think if people realized that they were being tracked all this time, they might not engage in certain activities they would otherwise engage in. Maybe they wouldn't go to a certain club they would otherwise go to, maybe they wouldn't go to a political rally that they might otherwise go to. And I think that's very harmful to our society."
Many people believe cell phones are harmful in another way; they can lead to cancerous tumors. But the medical establishment right now seems to be saying don't worry about it.
Dr. Bob Park, who heads the American Physical Society, wrote an editorial in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute saying we should abandon the idea that cell phones cause cancer. Park, a physicist, says phones don't emit enough energy to damage the body.
"There is no plausible mechanism by which cell phone usage can lead to cancer. It may lead to death in terms of automobile accidents, but it isn't going to lead to cancer," he says.
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Minnesota State Patrol assistant chief Steve Mengelkoch says the situation is much worse than statistics show. "We can only go by the candor of the person that we're talking to, if they're being truthful with us, if they're telling us why they, indeed, did crash. They're not going to say, 'I crashed because I wasn't paying attention, I was on the telephone,'" Mengelkoch says.
Despite the dearth of good data showing the relationship between cell phones and car crashes, the number of local and state governments considering restrictions is growing every year. Thirty-eight state legislatures are considering some kind of restrictions on mobile phones in cars. One of those states is Minnesota, but the bill from Rep. Mike Jaros, DFL-Duluth, is not receiving any significant support in the current legislative session.
In any case, concerns over car crashes, and loss of privacy can only grow as the number of wireless devices grows. More than 112 million Americans own mobile phones today, up from 28 million six years ago. Analysts say such explosive growth will likely continue until it seems like just about everyone has gone wireless.
Cutting the Cord | Wireless' Lab Rats | The Wireless Tether | Rural Minnesota's Place in the Wireless Derby | A Delicate Balance | Home
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