New Phone Uses GPS To Locate Your Contacts

Salvance writes "Palo Alto-based Loopt Inc. has announced an agreement with Sprint Nextel to immediately begin offering their cell phone mapping service to all 3.8 Million Sprint Boost subscribers (Sprint Boost is a service specifically targeting the under-25 market). This service will notify users when another subscriber in their contact list is within 25 miles, providing a real-time map displaying their contacts' locations. According to the article, the only apparent privacy safeguard is to provide users the option to 'temporarily cut out from being spotted by their friends.' Given a retailer's propensity to package together extra services, and the average user's lack of knowledge regarding their phone's capabilities, this new service seems ripe for abuse."

Re:Not really a privacy invasion:

[TubeSteak]

I buy two phones & stick one + lots of extra batteries in/on your car.

Privacy invasion or stalker heaven?
You decide.

Re:wow, that's every stalkers wet dream

[frakir]

A different approach might really work.

Imagine opt-in GPS tracking instead of opt-out. Eg: Bob requests tracking of Alice within $distance for $duration, Alice might agree or not, but default is OFF.

Some phone pairs, like mom-child might have tracking ON and not possible to switch off (it might go into cell service plan).

Definitely something I would love to have....

Helio has taken a different approach

[haunebu]

Helio [helio.com] is a joint venture between South Korea's SK Telecom [sktelecom.com] and EarthLink. They launched a slick new device (don't call it a phone =)) last week called the Drift [helio.com] that includes a hybrid GPS receiver (real GPS [wikipedia.org] and A-GPS [wikipedia.org]). It launched with a couple of GPS-enabled services: GPS-enabled Google maps [blogspot.com] and Buddy Beacon. The latter sounds pretty similar to Boost's solution, but takes a different approach to privacy.

With Buddy Beacon, users must intentionally broadcast their location to their friends list. It does not constantly track your whereabouts and auto-broadcast your new locale. It's more like "find me here" than "i'm searching for so-and-so..."

Response from loopt

[Mark Jacobstein]

Hi everyone, I run corporate development over at loopt and am in charge of all things safety, security and privacy related and I just wanted to clear up some major misconceptions reflected in the original posting and in some of the threads, and to reinforce some of the messages presented by Sam Altman, our CEO, in an earlier thread. 1)loopt is entirely opt-in. You must choose to get loopt, choose to become someone's friend, choose to share location with that person and then, and only then, would that person have access to your location. 2)I can promise you that there are numerous privacy safeguards and that there is no way that Sprint Nextel (or us) would ever green-light a service that didn't do everything possible to protect everyone's privacy and safety. 3)Briefly, some of those safeguards include: a.Everything is opt-in b.You can turn-off location sharing, with individuals or with everyone, at any time from your phone or the web or via SMS c.loopt is a private network, not an open social network. You can't even invite someone to be your friend unless you already know their phone number, and there is no open browsing d.We don't ever keep your location history, just your current location, unless you explicitly and actively choose to store a location for your journal, a feature that comes out next week e.We verify loopt members as the holder of the handset account they are attempting to register, to remove any anonymity, the source of much of the misbehavior on the web f.We send frequent reminders to our members regarding their location sharing, and we have constant and conspicuous reminders throughout the application as well g.We've consulted with literally a dozen online and mobile safety groups, including ICAC, WebWiseKids, the Ponemon Organization, and NCMEC to make sure we've incorporated every best practice in the industry into the service We're very happy that so many people are already using the loopt service, and I hope this helps clear up some of the misconceptions. We're always happy get any questions or comments ([e-mail])