Sat - December 20, 2003

Location-aware technology


Lost? Hiding? Your Cellphone Is Keeping Tabs
By AMY HARMON

n the train returning to Armonk, N.Y., from a recent shopping trip in Manhattan with her friends, Britney Lutz, 15, had the odd sensation that her father was watching her.

He very well could have been. Ms. Lutz's father, Kerry, recently equipped his daughters with cellular phones that let him see where they are on a computer map at any given moment. Earlier that day, he had tracked Britney as she arrived in Grand Central Terminal. Later, calling up the map on his own cellphone screen, he noticed she was in SoHo.

Mr. Lutz did not happen to be checking when Britney developed pangs of guilt for taking a train home later than she was supposed to, but the system worked just as he had hoped: she volunteered the information that evening.

"Before, they might not have told me the truth, but now I know they're going to," said Mr. Lutz, 46, a lawyer who has been particularly protective of Britney and her sister, Chelsea, 17, since his wife died several years ago. "They know I care. And they know I'm watching."

Driven by worries about safety, the need for accountability, and perhaps a certain "I Spy" impulse, families and employers are adopting surveillance technology once used mostly to track soldiers and prisoners. New electronic services with names like uLocate and Wherify Wireless make a very personal piece of information for cellphone users — physical location — harder to mask.

But privacy advocates say the lack of legal clarity about who can gain access to location information poses a serious risk. And some users say the technology threatens an everyday autonomy that is largely taken for granted. The devices, they say, promote the scrutiny of small decisions — where to have lunch, when to take a break, how fast to drive — rather than general accountability.

"It's like a weird thought I get sometimes, like `he definitely knows where I am right now, and he's looking to see if I'm somewhere he might not approve of,' " said Britney Lutz. "I wonder what it will be like when I start to drive."

Still, personal location devices are beginning to catch on, largely because cellular phones are increasingly coming with a built-in tether. A federal mandate that wireless carriers be able to locate callers who dial 911 automatically by late 2005 means that millions of phones already keep track of their owners' whereabouts. Analysts predict that as many as 42 million Americans will be using some form of "location-aware" technology in 2005.

Wireless companies and start-up firms are weaving the satellite system known as G.P.S., or Global Positioning System, which was begun by the United States military in the 1970's, into the cellular phone network and the Internet to sell products and services that provide location information.

After fixing an individual's location relative to a network of G.P.S. satellites orbiting 12,000 miles above the earth — or, more crudely, by the time it takes signals to bounce off nearby cell towers — personal locator services transmit the constantly updated information to a central database, where customers can retrieve it through the Internet, telephone or pager.

Until recently, one of the main civilian uses of G.P.S. was in devices issued by the criminal justice system to track offenders as a condition of their parole or probation. The new generation of tracking devices has moved well beyond that population and now takes many forms, from plastic bracelets that can be locked onto children to small boxes with tiny antennae that can be placed unobtrusively in cars.

"We are moving into a world where your location is going to be known at all times by some electronic device," said Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. "It's inevitable. So we should be talking about its consequences before it's too late."

Some of those consequences have not been spelled out. Will federal investigators be allowed to retrieve information on your recent whereabouts from a private service like uLocate, or your cellular carrier? Can the local Starbucks store send advertisements to your phone when it knows you are nearby, without your explicit permission?

Because the new electronic surveillance services are still in their infancy, there are few answers, but the debate over the boundaries of privacy in a more transparent world is already taking shape. Teenagers in particular tend to be skeptical of the new technology's value.

"Cellphones would lose their appeal if they became tracking devices," said Nate Bingham, 16, of Seattle. "I think if your parents really care that much they should just put a leash on you."

Mr. Bingham's parents use an AT&T service called Find Friend that lets them see his general location when his cellphone is on, based on the company's nearest cellular tower. He said his mother had at times asked him where he was and then used the service to see if he was telling the truth. He admits to turning the phone off occasionally when he doesn't want to be found.

That won't work in the Pratt household, in Garden City, N.Y., where Jason, 13, and Ashley, 11, were given new Nextel cellphones on the condition that they be kept on at all times. With uLocate, Tom Pratt set up his account on the company's Web site to establish a "geofence" around his home and his children's school. Every time the kids leave a 400-foot radius of either place, he gets an automatic e-mail alert: "Ashley has exited Home at 08:18 AM," read a typical message last week.

Jason Pratt said there were advantages to being watched. He no longer has to call his mother to let her know where he is. Instead, she can press a "locate" button on her phone and see for herself. So long as Jason's phone is running the uLocate software, it transmits his location information every two minutes. Jason's 17-year-old brother, Matthew, however, kept his older cellphone — even though it had poor reception — rather than submit to the new deal.

Howard Boyle, president of a fire sprinkler installation company in Woodside, N.Y., presented his employees with no such choice. The five workers who have been given company phones with the G.P.S. feature have not been told that Mr. Boyle can find out if they have arrived at a work site, and whether they are walking around in it or sitting still.

"They don't need to know," said Mr. Boyle, who hopes the service will help him determine the truth when clients claim they are being overbilled for the time his employees spent at their location. "I can call them and say, `Where are you now?' while I'm looking at the screen and knowing exactly where they are, just to make sure they're not telling me they're somewhere else."

But it is not just the unnerving effect of uncovering small lies that has some users of the technology worried. Like caller I.D., location devices lift the curtain on a zone of privacy that many Americans value, even if they rarely have anything serious to hide.

"Think back to when you were a teenager and your mom or dad said, `I don't want you do to this,' and you said, `yeah, yeah, yeah,' because you knew you could do it and they wouldn't know," said Graham Clarke, president of National Scientific, which makes several G.P.S. tracking devices. "Those days are gone now, because they actually can know."

Mr. Clarke recently installed a tracking device called Followit in the Jeep Wrangler of his 17-year-old son, Gordon. It alerts him if Gordon has exceeded 60 m.p.h. or traveled beyond preset boundaries.

Advocates of location-aware technology insist that its safety benefits — like locating a 911 caller or a stolen car — outweigh the privacy issues.

And for Donna Phillips, 66, whose husband, Hubie, has Alzheimer's disease, the ability to lock a G.P.S.-enabled bracelet from Wherify Wireless around Mr. Phillips's fanny pack when he goes out has meant an end to panicked searches when he fails to come home. Now her granddaughter can help her find her husband on the Wherify Wireless Web site, which displays the location information transmitted from the bracelet when an authorized user logs on.

About two weeks ago, Mr. Phillips, 90, boarded a bus near his home in Rancho Park, Calif., and traveled several miles before switching to another bus. Because he was moving too fast for his wife to catch up, she called the police, who were able to pinpoint his location through the Wherify Wireless service to pick him up.

Critics of the new technology do not dispute its usefulness, but worry that it will become ubiquitous before legal guidelines are established.

Last year, the Federal Communications Commission turned down a request from the cellular phone industry's association and privacy groups for guidance on such matters. For the moment, the questions of trust and tracking are being raised largely in the sphere of family and personal relationships, rather than in the public arenas of government and business.

Jerold Surdahl, 40, an administrator in a building management office in Centerville, Ohio, said he started using the uLocate service to communicate with colleagues. Now, he is intrigued by the possibility of stashing a location-tracking phone in the trunk of his wife's car.

"I'm not expecting or hoping or wanting to find something, but I would just like to explore the possibilities," Mr. Surdahl said. "I'd tell her about it later."

Your cell phone knows where you are. Is this a good idea? The New York Times' Amy Harmon explores the question

...personal location devices are beginning to catch on, largely because cellular phones are increasingly coming with a built-in tether. A federal mandate that wireless carriers be able to locate callers who dial 911 automatically by late 2005 means that millions of phones already keep track of their owners' whereabouts. Analysts predict that as many as 42 million Americans will be using some form of "location-aware" technology in 2005...

Posted at 06:37 PM    

Mon - November 24, 2003

You're on candid camera


Camera cellphones banned from change rooms
Last Updated: Nov 19 2003 08:14 AM MST

Calgary -Gyms are reviewing their privacy policies after a Calgary Y banned cellphones equipped with digital cameras from its change rooms.
"I think in an open area, where there is a lesser expectation of privacy, versus a change room setting, a washroom setting, I would think that would be the litmus test," Tim Chander, spokesman for the Alberta Privacy Commission, said. "But you have to take these on a case by case basis."

The YWCA said no one, as far as anyone knows, has been photographed in its change rooms. But it wants to make sure that pictures of its patrons don't end up on the web or in someone's e-mail inbox, and are asking that they be turned in to the front desk.

Mobile phones that can also take digital pictures and send them anywhere in the world are becoming more popular in Canada.

"A lot of people buy it because they can take a picture and post it up on a website within seconds," said cellphone retailer Preston Pardy.

The camera-phones have spawned a new form of personal website called moblogs, short for mobile web logs, which feature photos sent instantly over cellphone signals, along with the author's commentary.

The camera-equipped cellphones are more common in other parts of the world, as are rules on their use. In parts of Britain, Australia and the U.S. the phones aren't allowed near facilities.



Moblogs Seen as a Crystal Ball for a New Era in Online Journalism

But futurist Howard Rheingold says the ultimate democratization of the media will not be about technological advances; rather, it will entail upholding old-fashioned standards to earn viewers' trust.

Howard Rheingold
Posted: 2003-07-09

Editor's Note: On July 5, a few dozen mobile bloggers -- Web publishers who post photos, video and text to the Web from cell phones and other mobile devices -- gathered in Tokyo for the First International Moblogging Conference . The event was particularly resonant for author Howard Rheingold, who predicted in his book " Smart Mobs : The Next Social Revolution" that advances in technology would soon give everyone the tools they need to publish independent reports of news events as they are happening directly to the Web and other platforms.

"The moblogging conference is evidence that the culture of street bloggers I anticipated has sprouted in the real world," Rheingold writes. "I love watching a preposterous prediction materialize with baffling swiftness, especially when I was the fool who put the forecast in writing in the first place."

We asked Rheingold to pull together his thoughts on moblogging and how it will change journalism: Does the nascent moblogging movement mean journalism will eventually become more democratized, or is moblogging a fad destined to only ever be chic among a geeky minority?

Will the next Tiananmen Square uprising, the next shuttle crash or Rodney King beating be broadcast from thousands of citizen reporters' phones? Will average citizens eventually be part of the media machine, regularly contributing to and creating their own news reports, instead of just consuming them?

Rheingold's prediction: The answer is being formed today, and moblogging "is one of the leading indicators to watch as the shape of the new mediasphere becomes visible ... Because the winners and losers of the era of mobile media aren't decided yet ... the uncertainty of the situation presents an opportunity: Informed action in the near future could influence the way this nascent media culture develops -- or fails to develop -- for decades to come."

Smart Mobs Revisited
By Howard Rheingold

Although I could not be physically present at the First International Moblogging Conference, I was happy that it happened and delighted that it happened in Tokyo, if only because it vividly conjured the reality I had conjectured in "Smart Mobs" in October 2002: "What if smart mobs could empower entire populations to engage in peer-to-peer journalism? Imagine the power of the Rodney King video multiplied by the power of Napster. ... Putting video cameras and high-speed Net connections in telephones, however, moves blogging into the streets. By the time this book is published, I'm confident that street bloggers will have constructed a worldwide culture."

I quoted Justin Hall in "Smart Mobs" regarding the scenario that became technically possible in 2001, when one of the first mobile videophones fell into our hands and we wandered Tokyo, wondering what, exactly to do with it.

Hall, who was one of the conference attendees, wrote in 2002: "With the technology in place, it's only a matter of time before an amateur news video is directly distributed to the Web, or to 10 friends in video mail in a news chain letter. When that happens, this new form of news distribution will become the news, and then, ultimately, it will be no big deal."

As I write this, the world is in transition from my prediction and Justin's -- a moment when it is obvious that a new social phenomenon is emerging but it is not yet clear whether we are seeing a fad that is destined to be assimilated, commoditized, and/or disinformated, or whether we are witnessing the emergence of a powerful new medium for collective action, like the literacy that was enabled by the printing press and Internet.

Because the winners and losers of the era of mobile media aren't decided yet and the boundaries between domains have not been negotiated, the uncertainty of the situation presents an opportunity: Informed action in the near future could influence the way this nascent media culture develops -- or fails to develop -- for decades to come.

Once the new media regimes harden into place, individual or even collective effort to reshape them will be far more difficult, if not impossible. I think moblogging, and whatever it may evolve into, is one of the leading indicators to watch as the shape of the new mediasphere becomes visible -- and offers one of the most important leverage points for action.

The moblogging conference is evidence that the culture of street bloggers I anticipated has sprouted in the real world, although that name for the activity never occurred to me -- Adam Greenfield, one of the conference organizers, coined the term " moblogging " in November 2002.

Greenfield decided that the word should be pronounced with the "mob" part sounding like the word "mobile," but others, like Joi Ito , another conference attendee, pronounce it to sound like Smart Mobs. Because the name was invented in print (and online), the legitimate pronunciation can't be known until one emerges from common usage.

As far as Justin's forecast goes, sending still pictures from cameraphones to Weblogs is almost "no big deal" among teenagers in Tokyo, Helsinki, London, Rio de Janeiro. However, instantaneous street video of world-class breaking news beamed directly to the Web has yet to occur.

A pivotal moment like this, balanced on the inflection point between the deskbound regime of the PC era and the necessarily more fluid and untethered mobile-and-pervasive era, is the perfect time to ask whether the inevitable media incident will necessarily lead to peer-to-peer journalism. As futurist Paul Saffo notes, "Don't mistake a clear view for a short distance."

I would only add, in regard to many-to-many media: "Don't mistake the tool for the task." The right tools for global, instantaneous, multimedia production and distribution are necessary, but not sufficient, to achieve the goal of democratizing journalism.

... the most important remaining ingredient of a truly democratized electronic newsgathering is neither a kind of hardware nor a variety of software, but a species of literacy ...

Certainly in regards to the production tools, the sudden expansion of availability approaches the scale of democratization of knowledge enabled by the printing press. A high-quality digital video camera, equivalent to the $50,000 camera used by big league news crews years ago, can be obtained for $1,500, and that price will drop to $150 within 10 years. Another few thousand dollars today buys a digital editing tool that can double as a laptop computer and is equivalent to the editing facilities that used to rent for $100/hour. Wireless broadband Internet access and easy-to-use publishing tools like blogs have brought the means of distribution of journalism within financial reach of entire populations, as well.

But a dozen early adopters does not a movement make. Now that access to the means of production and distribution is no longer a barrier, the most important remaining ingredient of a truly democratized electronic newsgathering is neither a kind of hardware nor a variety of software, but a species of literacy -- widespread knowledge of how to use these tools to produce news stories that are attention-getting, non-trivial, and credible.

Journalism, if it is to deserve the name, is not about the quality of the camera, but about the journalist's intuition, integrity, courage, inquisitiveness, analytic and expressive capabilities, and above all, the trust the journalist has earned among readers.

Good journalists discern compelling stories in events, cultivate and mobilize networks of sources, double check and triple check facts, develop reputations that can only be won by getting the story right week after week, year after year.

The most famous pioneer in the earliest years of the democratization of journalism, Matt Drudge , did not establish a sterling example of new media's promise. Now that savvy and respected newspaper journalists like Dan Gillmor have become enthusiasts of what Gillmor calls "we journalism," some of the necessary professionalism has begun to correct the imbalance of Drudge's example. The Drudge Report serves as a cautionary tale for those who would fall victim to the magical thinking of assuming stronger democracy is the necessary result of the democratization of publishing.

Blogs, RSS syndication , RSS aggregators, metablogs and reputation systems like Technorati and NewsMonster now offer a dynamic and rapidly evolving collective editorial filtering system. Some of the sites that are linked by the most people and thus rise to the top of Blogdex or Daypop on a given day contain important breaking news, some of them are bizarre or even repulsive anomalies, some are obvious or covert hoaxes.

But the opposite of Saffo's dictum can also be true when innovators race each other: Never underestimate humble beginnings. The first personal computers with 16 kilobytes of RAM were useless. But today, we can hold in our hands computers and media players that are a million times more powerful and a fifth the price of the first PCs.

Evolutionary biologists sometimes speak of "arms races" where predators and prey rapidly co-evolve more effective offensive and defensive traits. The emergence of a filtering and reputation layer in the blogosphere is driven by the arms race between the need for useful information and the increasingly undifferentiated barrage of good, bad, ugly and incomprehensible words, images, sounds and software.

Now, by subscribing and linking to online sources we trust, the consumers of blog content are becoming a kind of collective editorial system. The more attentively we sift and analyze and share our discoveries online, the more the writers of blogs (and whatever blogs evolve into) can grow a social intelligence: personally tunable but collectively produced sense-making and way-finding. At least that's a plausible ideal.

For all its entertainment and social networking value, the most important promise of blogging is that it could help revivify the moribund public sphere that is as essential to democracy as voting. The petitions, letters to the editor, pamphleteering that preceded the American and French revolutions were essential enabling institutions for the experiments in self-government that followed.

But the arrival of political public relations and the "massification" of mesmerizing media have degraded the public sphere to the point where vituperative talk radio has married the brutal fascination of television wrestling with the verbal venom of online flame wars.

There are signs that after more than a decade of political insignificance, the democratic potential of the Internet is being realized by more people every day.

In Korea, Ohmynews helped tip an election and elect a president. Worldwide, Indymedia provided ad-hoc counter-media at the scene of political protests. During the worldwide demonstrations against the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the BBC Web site showed stills from cameraphone shots sent to them directly by participants in demonstrations from Stockholm to Rome. In the United States, the Howard Dean campaign emerged to the surprise of the majority of pundits because it used Internet-based organizing media such as a blog, Meetup.com , for early Dean enthusiasts to self-organize, and online fund-raising political e-commerce to the tune of $700,000 in one day. The 2004 election looms as a watershed event for Internet-based media. Moblog the conventions!

Moblogging is at a convergence of technical capabilities with the insatiable human thirst for new ways to learn, create, and communicate, and the political necessity for a truly effective peer-to-peer journalism as a counter to "disinfotainment" cartels. Here's hoping that the pioneers will be joined by millions of others, that the Matt Drudges will be forgotten as the Dan Gillmors emerge by the dozens. Once upon a time, reporters were heroes. Maybe moblogging will help revive the endangered and vital tradition.


Moble blogging, or "moblogs' are probably the main reason camera cellphones are increasingly being banned from fitness club change rooms. Taking a picture in a place you're not supposed to is one thing. Uploading it to the web is another step. How is it being done instantly? I wondered how they did that. Now we know...

Also...I wrote a few days ago about moblogging and my remark: "...there may not be much to it except a bunch of hyper-excited cell phone users flipping pictures on the web taken with these miniature portable camera devices, simply because they can" caught the attention of moblogger Shawn Honnick.

Shawn writes "There's a lot more to it!"

...which made me wonder if there is more to it. Since I'm uninformed about moblogs, I did a quick search to find out what's being written about the trend. Here's the first in a series of articles about moblogs. From the Online Journalism Review Howard Rheingold writes...

Posted at 07:42 AM    

Sun - November 23, 2003

Pal Pix



My friends Karen Moskowitz and Michael Cozzi were here this afternoon to borrow a DV camera. I took this camera-phone snapshot of the pair of them, and a pic of Karen and me. This is why Karen is a professional photographer and I'm an amateur one.


Posted at 06:00 PM    

Moblogs!



I knew this would happen. I think of something I think is new and unique, and it's already been happening, somebody's already doing it. Okay, not zillions exactly, but, let's say, lots. There's a whole subculture on the web devoted to uploading pictures taken with mini phone cams. Moblogs, they're called. I found the link accidentally through xeni.net It's a subsection of her website, which is linked through a group of Wired magazine contributors, the top blog dogs at boingboing.net (like I'm going to discover something before the hipsters at Wired?)

I've only browsed the top layer of this community , and there may not be much to it except a bunch of hyper-excited cell phone users flipping pictures on the web taken with these miniature portable camera devices, simply because they can. That's good enough reason for me. Almost all the pictures you see here were taken with my sony ericsson T616.


Posted at 12:44 AM    

Fri - November 21, 2003

Customized Themes



Ever since I got a Sony Ericsson T616 cell phone, and discovered that its look-and-feel is highly-customizable, I haven't been able to leave it alone. Besides having a built-in camera, I find that the ability to transfer image files wirelessly from my phone to my desktop via Bluetooth is enormously convenient. I enjoy a lot of the PDA-like features that I thought I'd ignore. But the main thing I do is create customized mini-screensavers. Many of the images you see here are actually created first for my phone, then re-used as category icons for this website.






While 90% of the images I currently use are original cartoons, illustrations, and photos, a few images were drawn from a variety of sources (mostly on the web) and clearance to use them for anything other than my own personal amusement is uncertain. As soon as I get a 100% fully-original series together, I'm thinking of offering them to fellow Sony Ericsson hobbyists on a download page somewhere. In the meantime, I collected the miniature icons (the page you'll see says 'original', it just means I prepared them for my personal phone, most of them are home-made) web-gallery here .

Posted at 05:25 AM    

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