doesn't mean that they aren't watching me.
Paranoid schizophrenics live in a a terrifying world where there every act, thought and feeling is being observed by someone; usually a malevolent person, but not necessarily, the act of observation, against the will of the victim who is powerless to resist or change the situation is itself a dreadful experience.
But what will happen to our minds, our sense of safety and wellbeing, our feeling of individuality, when we are subject to constant, total, endless intrusive observation? Paranoia generates the thing it most fears, but what will the thing a paranoid sufferer most fears cause in the rest of us?
In the last couple of weeks I've been coming across stories in various places that get me wondering whether we are really might be fooling with something dangerous in location aware services. Korea requires all phone operators to install GPS chips in all new mobile phones, in the US Nextel now includes the chips in all its new phones and marketers are salivating at the prospect of being able to flog us location based services, some reckon that by 2008 it could run to $8 Billion a year.
The December 15 edition of Newsweek reports that the Europeans are trying to balance the technological capabilities with legislation, preventing location data being used without consumer consent, except in the case of emergency calls and police needs. Mhmm, and if you believe legislation will save the day, good luck, because the US and UK are planning to use such data for anti-terrorist actions; and in today's world, we are all suspect. Oops.
Meanwhile the IHT gives us this in Lost? Hiding? Cellphone tells - Parents and employers turn to GPS technology
On the train returning to Armonk, New York, 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. 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. Earlier that day, he had tracked Britney as she arrived in Grand Central Station. Later, calling up the map on his own cellphone screen, he noticed she was in the SoHo district in Manhattan.
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 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 - 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 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."
The things are being used to create even more specific constraints arpound other people, like this;
in the Pratt household, in Garden City, New York, 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, or 120-meter, radius of either place, he gets an automatic e-mail alert: "Ashley has exited Home at 08:18 a.m.," read a typical message last week.
Electronic privately run prisons for your kids, a great idea. I wonder if any of these already paranoid parents have thought of the effects on their kids of this endless, intruisive, fear-induced surveillance will be in a decade or so.
Meanwhile the British Government is going to public surveillance lengths that Big Brother himself would have approved, according to the Independent, Four million CCTV cameras watch public. UK has the highest level of surveillance. According to the story, there is no measurable reduction in crime and my suspicious mind says that when the number of cameras crosses the right threshold, Britains will either learn to live with the creepy feeling that someone is watching them, or they will start to go crazy.
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