A favorite pastime of Internet users is to share their location: services like Google Latitude can inform friends when you are nearby; another, Foursquare, has turned reporting these updates into a game.
But as a German Green party politician, Malte Spitz, recently learned, we are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not. Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts.
The results were astounding. In a six-month period ”” from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin.
Wow! “Big Bro” is here, eh? But God is watching what “Big Bro” is doing too. He is still the Sovereign Lord of the universe.
Well, why not? People happily and willingly Tweet their daily movements and post all sorts of pictures and personal info on Facebook (if anyone truly thinks social media is secure, no matter what settings are used, they’re naive). This is an age in which many people cheerfully give up their privacy — until something negatively unexpected bites them.
There is a Brave New World, nor are we out of it. Larry