Cellphones that track kids click with parents

By Amy Harmon
The New York Times

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On 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 could have been. Britney'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. He had tracked Britney earlier that day as she arrived in Grand Central Station. Later, calling up the map on his cellphone screen, he noticed she was in SoHo.

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 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 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 such as uLocate and Wherify Wireless make a personal piece of information — physical location — harder to mask.

Lack of legal clarity

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 largely is 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 a more 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,' " Britney said. "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, the most popular device of the communications age, 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 as many as 42 million Americans will be using some form of "location-aware" technology in 2005.

Global-Positioning System

Wireless companies and start-up firms are weaving the satellite system known as GPS, or Global Positioning System, which was launched by the military in the 1970s, 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 GPS satellites orbiting 12,000 miles above 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 GPS 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."

Consequences unknown

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 such as 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 in their infancy, there are few answers, but the debate over the boundaries of privacy in a more transparent world is 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."

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 at times had 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 receives an automatic e-mail alert: "Ashley has exited Home at 08:18 AM," read a typical message recently.

Jason Pratt said there are 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 brother, Matthew, 17, however, kept his older cellphone — even though it had poor reception — rather than submit to the new deal.

Tracking employees

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 GPS feature have not been told that 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 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 ID, 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 to do 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 GPS tracking devices. "Those days are gone now, because they actually can know."

Clarke recently installed a tracking device called Followit in the Jeep Wrangler of his son, Gordon. It alerts him if Gordon, 17, has exceeded 60 mph or traveled beyond preset boundaries.

Safety benefits

Advocates of location-aware technology insist that its safety benefits — such as 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 GPS-enabled bracelet from Wherify Wireless around Phillips' fanny pack when he goes out has meant an end to panicked searches when he fails to come home.

Her granddaughter now 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, Phillips 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 police, who were able to pinpoint his location through the Wherify Wireless service and 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.

The Federal Communications Commission last year turned down a request from the cellular-phone industry's association and privacy groups for guidance on such matters. For the moment, 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.

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company