A Future With Nowhere to Hide? Tracking turns the freedom of mobile telephony upside down.(Cover Story)

Byline: Steven Levy

We're all too familiar with the concept of technology as a double-edged sword, and wireless is no exception. In fact, the back edge of this rapier is sharp enough to draw blood. Yes, the idea of shedding wires and cables is exhilarating: we can go anywhere and still maintain intimate contact with our work, our loved ones and our real-time sports scores. But the same persistent connectedness may well lead us toward a future in which our cell phones tag and track us like FedEx packages, sometimes when we're not aware.

To see how this might work, check out Worktrack, a product from the Mountain View, California, "mobile services" company Aligo. The system is sold to employers who want to automate and verify digital time logs on their workers in the field. The first customers are in the heating and air-conditioning business. Workers have GPS-equipped cell phones that pinpoint their locations to computers in the back office. Their peregrinations can be checked against the "Geo Fence" their employers draw up, circumscribing the area where their work is situated. (This sounds uncomfortably like the pet-control technology, those "invisible fences" that give Rover a good stiff shock if he ventures beyond the backyard.)

"It they're not in the right area, they're really not working," says Aligo CEO Robert Smith. "A notification will come to the back office that they're not where they should be." The system also tracks how fast the workers drive, so the employer can verify to insurance companies that no one is speeding. All of this is perfectly legal, of course, as employers have the right to monitor their workers. Smith says that workers like the technology because it ensures that they get credit for the time they spend on the job.

Worktrack is only one of a number of services devoted to tracking humans. Parents use similar schemes to make sure their kids are safe, and many drivers are already allowing safety monitors to keep GPS tabs on their travels (OnStar, anyone?). Look for the practice to really explode as mobile-phone makers continue to incorporate GPS in their handsets. The U.S. government requires all cell phones to have GPS that can pinpoint the owner's ...