A couple of years ago, Global Positioning Systems (GPS) were all the rage. I remember the first time one of my friends got a navigation system in his car. It was almost eerie to hear an automated voice rattle off directions on the fly. Gone were the days where I’d sit shotgun and misdirect the driver. Now we could just plug the destination address into the dashboard, and Ms. GPS would map our our route, track our progress, and tell us where to turn. In recent years, there has been a push to get GPS units into cell phones. And you know what? It’s a good thing, despite what dashboard GPS unit makers might tell you.
Never get lost again
Yes, the first thing you think of when GPS comes to mind, as I illustrated above, is the turn-by-turn directions. No one likes getting lost, and in recent years we’ve come across many developments that have helped to keep us on familiar ground. Mapquest came and changed the game, giving us directions from Point A to Point B in a snap.
Yeah, sometimes the directions are a bit off, and sometimes they aren’t so clear. But many times it beats the hell out of listening to your friend — with no sense of direction, of course — tell you that “oh, it’s the street about a thousand feet after the Getty station…” That always leads to disaster.
Still, if you got lost somewhere along the way, there was no way to correct your directions. You had to go stop at a gas station and pray the person working behind the counter knew the area.
Then came the in-dash navigations, which had the added benefit of being real-time. Go the wrong way at a confusing fork in the road? Your GPS would just reroute you and get you back on track. Plus, many of them would give you gas stations along the way, just in case you weren’t minding the tank.
The problem is that these units are often expensive, even as add-ons when you buy a new car. As a result, not everyone has one. But nearly everyone has a cell phone. And waddya know? They’re all being made with GPS units installed, thanks to an FCC initiative.
This, of course, has led carriers like Verizon to use these GPS functionalities to create a turn-by-turn navigation system on your cell phone. So now you only have to spend money on the GPS service, rather than spending money on the service and the GPS unit.
Getting lost no more. All thanks to your cell phone.
Emergency location
A story emerged early in the year of an Australian group being lost in the woods, only to be found because someone took pictures of their surroundings with a camera phone. Of course, that wouldn’t have been necessary if they had a GPS unit installed in the phone.
If this happened in the U.S., since phones have to have GPS units installed, authorities could have tracked their location and found them more easily. This is the very reason why the FCC mandated GPS units be included in cell phones. They felt that it would lend itself to public safety.
Which it does, to an extent. The GPS units are trackable to within 300 feet they say, so you can be reasonably sure that if you have your cell phone on you and the GPS function is turned on, you’ll be able to be found in case of an emergency.
Abuses of power
Sure, it’s great to have GPS when you’re in a bind, but what about other times? Many people fear that people are tracking them all the time, and that the walls of privacy are being stripped down. To an extent, that argument has validity. However, most if not all phones allow you to turn your GPS off when you don’t need it.
And then you have cases like Montclair State University in New Jersey. In response to the decrease in dormitory landline use and the Virginia Tech shootings, they are requiring all new students to carry a school-issued Sprint cell phone with GPS — and are requiring them to pay for it. Yes, some students take solace in the safety it provides. Others, of course, are livid at the images it evokes of 1984 and Big Brother.
Apparently, most students don’t turn on the GPS feature — about five to 10 instance a week on a campus of 13,000 students. However, there is still concern that the GPS is working even when off.
[Raju] Rishi said campus police are not monitoring the movements of students who don’t turn on the GPS feature. “There’s no Big Brother,” Rishi said. “You need a subpoena to locate somebody against their will.”
Yes, and the government needs a warrant to wiretap phones, but that doesn’t stop them.
Still, the benefits of GPS seem to far outweigh the possible negatives at the moment. In any event, there isn’t much of a choice at this point. All units are required to contain GPS units, anyway.
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