Telstra’s Whereis Everyone service is bound to raise a few eyebrows. It’s great if you want to locate a few friends and they are happy for you to be able to locate where they are at anytime but….. what about any privacy concerns? Are you happy to be located anywhere anytime? The press and commentators, as usual, is going to town on some of the more alarmist uses.
We have very little privacy left in our lives - some would argue that it disappeared some time ago. Anyway, here’s another example of technology with the potential for intruding further into our lives. Telstra has some great sales pitches - its certainly nice to be able to know your kids are on their way home or how you can find your misplaced phone (is it really that accurate?) but are we becoming immune or blase to these invasions of privacy? If we know we are being monitored so closely will that affect our behaviour in any way (as in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon) or are we simply past caring?
Wikipedia also has an interesting modern definition of the Panopticon. I had a rant about this previously after reading “John Twelve Hawk’s” “The Traveller” (must have a look to see if the sequel is out yet). Anyway, if you are interested in this type of technology from legal/policy/social perspectives, you might like to go along to UNSW’s free one day seminar ‘You are where you’ve been - technological threats to your location privacy‘ on 23rd July. Just don’t forget to turn your (Telstra) phone off before you go 
.
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Hi. I work at Telstra and thought it important to point out that the location service is purely voluntary. Customers need to agree to be tracked and can easily switch the service off at any time. There’s also an extra safeguard of fortnightly reminders sent as a text message to customers advising them they are connected to the service. Peter.
Hi Peter,
Thanks for your comments. I am trying to stay neutral on whether these types of location based services are a good or a bad thing in this context - I think that is up to the user/consumer. I use some location based services and think they are fantastic but that is just my personal view. What I am interested in exploring is the attitudes towards such services and how they may affect our behaviour. Going back to Bentham’s design of the Panopticon (which was originally a design for a prison), the idea was that if you thought you were being watched, that would affect the way you behaved and would result in a ‘better behaving population’. We live in a different world now though where forms of monitoring are becoming ubiquitous - hence the idea of the Internet Panopticon as suggested in the Wikipedia article I guess. What I am wondering is whether, in a society that can be monitored so closely, whether that ‘panopticon’ effect still applies and if so, to what extent.
Your right about the opting in and opting out for using the service and obviously there is a cost for using it so it’s probably something you’re unlikely to forget about.
On another dimension though an interesting question to consider is whether there ever will, at some point in the future in some jurisdictions be a market or service for tracking people without their informed consent. This would raise a number of interesting issues worth debating.
Cheers.
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