The New York Times Sponsored by Starbucks January 16, 2003 Keeping Tabs: A
Two-Way Street By WILL WADE

An ordinary day at the zoo for Timothy Neher was quickly turning traumatic.
"It was the first time I ever got to take out my niece and nephew by
myself," he remembers of the 1997 outing. "Everything was fine until
lunchtime. I glanced up at the menu at the snack bar; it couldn't have been
more than a few seconds, but when I looked down they were gone."

His 5-year-old niece and 3-year-old nephew were nowhere in sight. "I felt
that panicky feeling every parent dreads," Mr. Neher said.

Then the five-minute crisis was over. The children had wandered behind the
snack stand. "When I took the kids home that night," he said, "I told their
parents we'd had some excitement, but I'd come up with a great idea for a
company."

Almost six years later, the company, Wherify Wireless in Redwood Shores,
Calif., has produced the Personal Locator, a satellite-based tracking
device intended to head off the kind of panic that Mr. Neher experienced.

Location-sensing technologies based on satellite-based systems or infrared
tracking are not new. But design advances have made the components small
enough to fit into hand-held units, or to be built into bracelets or
backpacks, relaying information that can readily be monitored on the Web.
Couple that with a more security-conscious world, and suddenly tracking
systems seem to be everywhere, keeping tabs on the whereabouts of children,
elderly relatives and even belongings - in addition, of course, to helping
drivers, hikers and sailors find their way from point to point.

But for most consumers, the tracking may be not always be so much a service
as a cost of doing business. Increasingly, cellphones can allow your
location to be traced, ostensibly to help in an emergency. Grocery carts
equipped with infrared devices can keep track of your wanderings in the ice
cream aisle or the produce section.

And fare-paying medallions like E-ZPass record when and where you passed a
tollbooth.

Location industry veterans see a strong demand for tracking technology.

"The demand for pure navigation systems is limited," said Marc Prioleau,
director of marketing at Sirf Technology of San Jose, Calif., a developer
of satellite-based navigation components. Boats and planes are a small
market, and the largest potential area for navigation systems is cars.

Mr. Prioleau noted, however, that tracking gear could be included in almost
anything.

It is already used by shipping companies to monitor their trucks and by law
enforcement agencies to keep tabs on parolees, and new applications are
beginning to emerge.

"I think that's going to be the driving force going forward," he said.

"We're starting to see a pretty major uptick in sales."

Even as such devices are becoming more attractive to consumers, the
two-edged nature is also becoming more apparent.

Eric Orr, a retired police officer and private security consultant in
Chesapeake, Va., liked the concept of the Wherify Personal Locator so much
he bought five of them and plans to buy five more. "I have two young
children, and with all the nieces and nephews there are a lot of kids in
our family," he said. "When I'm done, all of them are going to be wearing
these bracelets."

But as a security expert specializing in surveillance, Mr. Orr also sees
the potential of this technology to monitor people without their knowledge
or consent.

"It would be very easy to mount this type of device in a car and keep track
of where people are going all the time," he pointed out. "It only takes
half a twist to make this a real invasion of privacy. It's very scary."

The technology at the heart of the Personal Locator and comparable devices
is the Global Positioning System (G.P.S.), developed by the military in the
1970's and 80's for navigation applications, like helping sailors and
pilots determine their location.

G.P.S. is based on a network of 24 satellites, each constantly broadcasting
a radio signal. A receiver unit on the ground compares the signals coming
in from three or four satellites to calculate its precise location, usually
to within 20 yards.

Some receivers can refine this calculation using additional timing data
obtained from ground-based communication networks, often improving their
accuracy to within about five yards. Infrared sensor systems can also
monitor the movement of objects, with much better accuracy but within a
smaller area.

Wherify's Personal Locator is worn on the wrist and looks like a digital
watch pumped up on steroids. Parents can give it to their children and then
use the Wherify Web site to find out where they are. It has G.P.S. and
cellular telephone components, so whenever a user logs onto the Web site,
the network basically calls the Locator and asks the built-in G.P.S. device
for its location, in latitude and longitude.

Mr. Neher said the bracelet design is better than stitching the system into
a backpack, because packs are easy to take off.

Those coordinates are then plotted on a map and displayed on the Web. If
parents are not near a computer, they can call the Wherify center and ask
an operator to find their child. "If you're in Central Park and you lose
your kids, we can tell you over the phone where they are," Mr. Neher said.
"We can say they are 50 feet in front of the north gate."

Another company, Pomals Inc. of Westport, Conn., is developing a similar
tracker built into a child-size backpack, but its first product is aimed at
the corporate world. This month, the company introduced a G.P.S.-enabled
sleeve for hand-held computers, which allows the unit to know its position.
When the device uses its wireless connection to check in with the network,
it also reports its location and can ask for various location-specific
information, whether the user is looking for the nearest client or sales
lead or a good Japanese restaurant in the neighborhood.

Coppy Holzman, president and chief executive of the company, says this type
of location-aware device can make ordinary tasks much more efficient. "If
you're going to the cleaners, the P.D.A. will know when you're getting
close and can send a signal to let them know you'll be pulling up so they
can get your shirts," he said. "If you're going home, it can automatically
turn on the heat when you're a mile away from the door."

But he acknowledges that this type of convenience comes with a potentially
significant trade-off: information about people's everyday movements can be
very valuable. "Our company is starting to get noticed, and after people
looking for jobs, the greatest number of calls we get are from people who
want to buy our data," Mr. Holzman said.

"But that's not our business. We don't store the data about where people
go, and we don't sell it."

Many people are in the business of collecting and selling data, of course,
and Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy
Information Center, a watchdog group, predicts that location-tracking
systems will become a more common tool for them. "Marketing people want to
know as much about people as they can," he said.

And soon the location-information industry will hit the jackpot. In
response to Federal Communications Commission mandates, wireless carriers
have begun to incorporate location technology into cellphones, partly
because many people use them to report emergencies but do not know exactly
where they are calling from, hindering rescue efforts.

A side effect of the so-called Enhanced 911 rules is that every cellphone
will soon become a mobile tracking unit, monitoring the location from which
every call is placed.

In addition to the data's potential use in marketing, Mr. Rotenberg said,
the ability to monitor people's movements could be used by employers, to
find out where workers are using company-issued phones; in law enforcement,
to determine where people are at a specific time; or in domestic disputes,
to log patterns of behavior of, say, a wayward husband who often makes
calls from his secretary's home.

"Real-time location data is the holy grail in the mobile phone industry,"
Mr. Rotenberg said.

Even more innovative applications are on the horizon, innovations that
depend on tracking individual movements. For example, a state task force in
Oregon this month proposed a pay-as-you-drive system that uses G.P.S.
tracking to determine how far every vehicle travels, as a possible
alternative to a gasoline tax. "You can really track anything you want,"
Mr. Prioleau said.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company


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