The All-Seeing Eyes.(location awareness technology hampered by privacy concerns)

No wireless internet offering has gotten more recent hype than one that allows your cell phone to pinpoint the nearest restaurant, police station, friend or relative. "Location awareness" has been labeled the next killer app by industry watchers, and it's here now. Japan pioneered the technology in the mid-1990s, European operators including Vodafone introduced it in 1999 and Americans followed in the last two years. No nation is farther along than South Korea, where SK Telecom uses the technology to call customers strolling by its Seoul airport lounge, inviting them inside. This beckoning from out of the blue evokes the intimate "awareness" of the wireless networks depicted in "The Matrix."

That future is almost upon us, or so we're told. The buzz over location awareness rose a few years ago as well, then died. It's back, due in part to new legislation in the United States, the European Union and South Korea, which will require operators to beef up the technology as a tool for emergency police and ambulance services. The EU rule took effect in September; the U.S. law will do so in 2005. Location- awareness services currently represent only a few million dollars of operator revenue in both Europe and the United States, and projections for 2008 range from $1 billion to more than $11 billion for both markets. The range is due to uncertainty over whether operators, or someone else, will profit most from the broad array of offerings, which could include buddy finders, mapping services, real-world hide-and-seek games, traffic navigators, hazardous-material trackers and targeted ads. The downside: while these services would allow you to find anyone with a cell phone almost instantly, the reverse is also true. Anyone could find you.

Like many promises (and threats) on the wireless Internet, this may take a while to realize fully. One challenge is accuracy. Japan's pioneering "personal handyphone" used the caller's position relative to the nearest network antenna to pinpoint locations, and NTT DoCoMo still uses a similar technology for its ...