Recently I have read a new wave of unfortunate messages that pander fear to the uninformed in the privacy vs safety debate. The universal value of location in technology today far outweighs statistically insignificant risk.
Fear Mongering
You’ve probably seen videos or news stories like this one before.
The tone of the news report compels me to share the alternative perspective you need to know. It seems that the few stories of tragedy only make the news.
Even though this video is 2 years old, it shows that even the authorities do not fully understand the value of location technology. To be sure, even non-GPS phones can have their location triangulated based on cell towers, here in the United States. And, this has been possible well before the date of this news story.
Now that I have your attention – this article is not about geo-tagged photos, instead, it is about overcoming fear in order to know where your loved ones are, and finding them when you need to.
Well Past The Point Of Fear
Seth Godin the prolific blogger and visionary recently posted “The Illusion of Privacy (and what we actually care about). The shift to benefit from location technology is past. Embrace it, for fear only increases your own risk that you won’t benefit from it when you need it most.
Let’s look at this pragmatically. Location technology is far more valuable in pushing bad people away from our children and loved ones – if we embrace it. When all people can be located, good people will know where the bad people are. If bad people know that their location is evident, or their potential victim’s location is evident, they will know the risk of getting caught is increased – hence it is a deterrent. In the unfortunate and tragic event when a loved one is missing, the technology is, and has, increasingly helpful to us in identifying the best location for authorities to look.
Unfortunately, the fear merchants want us to believe that giving away our location, will ALWAYS result in tragedy. Photos taken with smart phones with location tags, GPS location tracking, or other location based technology in our smart phones and vehicles provide so much more value and dramatically outweigh this risk.
Why Enable GPS
My family never turns off the GPS chip in our smart phones. So many turn this off in their smartphone settings based solely on fear. We use check-in services, like Foursquare to regularly post location. In addition, location-enabled photos posted to Facebook, Twitter, etc. create a detailed historical timeline or trail. Through location based technology, we can find each other, especially in case of emergency.
Avert This Kind Of Tragedy
Imagine if Elizabeth Smart who disappeared in June of 2002 when she was 14, held for 9 months, or any of the hundreds of kidnap victims missing today had this technology? Authorities would have had location data to help find Elizabeth before she had to endure 9 month of fear from her captors?
What about Jaycee Lee Dugard, kidnapped in 1991 and held captive for 11 years of fear in Lake Tahoe? This case had “no reliable leads” (Wikipedia). One can only conclude that if she had a smart phone with location-tracking back then, she would have been rescued sooner.
Media’s Role
Wouldn’t it be better for the news to put fear in the bad people that they now have a greater chance to be caught if they stalk our children? That is, if the news-writers wrote a story that demonstrated how easy it would be for parents to track and find bad people stalking their kids, and the moment their kid went “off grid”, they were alerted? That actually works too – the technology is good-bad agnostic!
Location Technology In Society
Just as police have fingerprinting services for parents to permanently record the identity of their children, authorities should promote the adoption of Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon Family Locator smart phone apps. The speed 
that authorities can access location data exponentially increases the chance they can find a missing loved one. This is true for kids, as well as older people who may need monitoring.
Location technology has great promise to do far greater good for society than the risk in news stories like the link above. Like all things that give power to people, those powers can be used for good, and for evil – if we magnify the good, it diminishes the risk of evil.
Thinking Ahead
Today, nearly every new vehicle is location enabled. Why? Lowers insurance cost, deters theft, reduces loss from stolen vehicles, enables recovery, and …, helps us find our families in times of urgency, or emergency. Then there is the huge list of future LBS-based features your vehicle will have and benefits for the consumer…
Perhaps the next iPhone, Android, or Microsoft Mobile device should have location ALWAYS ON by default.
What do you think? Do you have a family tracking app on your family’s smart phones? Can you find your children using this powerful source of information?
