The Eye in the Sky

Better People-Tracking Through Technology

December 2008

Tanya Rider would have died without her cell phone. The 33-year-old woman missed a turn and accidentally drove her SUV off the road south of Seattle last September. Her vehicle landed in a ravine, out of sight from the road, and she remained pinned in the wreckage. After seven days of searching on foot, police sent a “ping” to Rider’s cell phone.

“The phone sent a faint electronic response to the nearest cell phone tower, which helped police narrow their search and rescue Rider, who was on the verge of dying from hypothermia and internal injuries. Had it been any longer, she might not have survived,” State Patrol Trooper Jeff Merrill said at a press conference.

Meanwhile, a few miles away in downtown Seattle, attorney Albert Gidari Jr. was noticing a disturbing trend. As a lawyer who specializes in telecom issues and privacy, Gidari monitors requests for access to records that document the exact location of cell phone owners. In hundreds of cases, Gidari noticed, federal law enforcement agents won access to those records without proving probable cause to suspect that the individual in question might have broken a law, and without obtaining a warrant. The practice continues today.

“It’s full tracking capability,” Gidari told the Washington Post, “It’s a scary proposition.” Giadari did not return phone calls seeking comment for this story.

Technology is making it easier than ever to find people. The advances are being used to improve safety and save lives and to solve smaller but vexing problems, such as getting lost in a new city or losing friends in a crowd.

Some new uses raise serious privacy concerns, however. Whether it’s a jilted lover spying on an ex, a corporation using location data to create precise consumer profiles or a government agency collecting data on innocent civilians, privacy experts worry that the new generation of tracking devices threatens to make America’s long-held beliefs about privacy obsolete.

“We have the ability to track with a level of accuracy that most people probably don’t know is possible,” says Harry Trombitas, an FBI special agent who uses leading-edge techniques as head of the bank robbery unit in southern Ohio. “We can get it down to within a few feet.”

All that data must be stored somewhere. Without proper passwords and encryption, it could easily fall into the hands of identity thieves, who could use it to build a precise picture of your shopping habits and daily routine.

“Location data is extraordinarily rich,” says Lee Tien, senior attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “If you track every movement I make for a week, you’d have a pretty good idea of what I do, who my friends are and what kinds of relationships I have. It gets very invasive very quickly.”

This new era of tracking is driven less by new technology than by the artful packaging of old technology, especially the Global Positioning System (GPS) and cell phones. The Federal Telecommunications Act of 1996 required all cell phones to be capable of communicating their location to emergency responders, either by sending a signal to cellular towers or by installing GPS chips into phones. Since then, GPS itself has evolved from an expensive novelty into a common, stand-alone product.

Other location devices have remained obscure so far, but may yet grow in popularity. There’s Skyhook, a Boston-based company that maps all the Internet hotspots around the country and uses them to home in on the location of wireless devices, from Personal Digital Assistants to laptops. There’s also Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) which uses tiny transponders to communicate bits of data via radio waves.

“All of these technologies can be used for tracking,” said Jim Van Cleave, vice president of Spectrum Management, which was started in 1980 as one of the first companies specializing in tracking technology. “The only question is how do you want to use them? What problem needs to be solved?”

Perhaps one of the best examples of putting tracking devices to good use is Project Lifesaver. The Virginia-based nonprofit gives bracelets equipped with GPS, radio frequency and cellular trackers to people with Alzheimer’s disease. Oftentimes, these patients can become disoriented and wander off, which quickly can become a life-threatening situation if they get injured or become dehydrated. 

With Project Lifesaver, caregivers call local police and inform them that a patient is missing. The police use the bracelet’s three tracking devices to home in on the person, cutting days of searching down to a few minutes.

“I can’t tell you how many times we’ve gotten there in the nick of time to find traffic stopped with a patient standing there in the middle of the road,” says Barry Thacker, operations chief for Project Lifesaver.

In other situations, the value of tracking is heavily debated. In a well-known case in Washington State, police and prosecutors argued they did not need a warrant to place a GPS device on a suspect’s car because doing so is the same as assigning a police officer to trail the suspect.

The Washington Supreme Court disagreed, saying in a unanimous decision that GPS tracking is a more invasive form of surveillance, and therefore requires a warrant. Most other states have no consistent rules on the subject, however, leaving police free to enforce the law as they currently interpret it.

This is what concerns privacy advocates. “The whole logic that this is the same as traditional tracking is facetious,” says Tien. “Assigning police officers to follow someone is an expensive proposition. When you can do the same thing with an inexpensive GPS system, it opens up a world of surveillance possibilities that never would have been conceivable before.”

Another type of location information that often winds up in courts comes from E-ZPass and other electronic toll booth systems, where motorists pre-buy toll credits that are stored in miniature computers and relayed to the toll plaza via RFID. Each pass through a toll booth is recorded and stored in a database permanently. That data is regularly subpoenaed by police trying to establish the movements of a suspect, and oftentimes by divorce lawyers trying to prove that a spouse is having an affair.

Here privacy advocates tread a fine line. If data can be used to solve a crime or settle a legal dispute, it may be of value. Then again, motorists buying into E-ZPass probably never suspect that their movements will be tracked and recorded permanently.

“I don’t want to be seen as supporting infidelity,” says Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy for Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. “But when the technology is available it will be used, for good or ill.”

Other car-based tracking systems raise concerns, too. Progressive Insurance is rolling out a new program that uses GPS to track how far and fast people drive, offering lower premiums to safe drivers. A similar system is OnStar, installed on all General Motors cars. Starting this year, the company can use OnStar to kill the car’s engine and force it to stop – from remote – if contacted by police who suspect the car has been stolen. This means that GM now has the ability to track every one of its cars anywhere in the country in real time.

Both GM and OnStar promise not to misuse the data.

“We have an opt-out process where if for whatever reason you have an OnStar and you’re uncomfortable with a particular capability, you can disable it,” says Chet Huber, CEO of OnStar. But large loopholes in both companies’ contracts concern many privacy advocates.

“If you read the fine print, most of these contracts say that the company can change its policy at any time, so that’s no guarantee for consumers,” says Carmen Balber, an analyst for Consumer Watchdog, a California-based, non-profit consumer education and advocacy organization. “Inch by inch, Americans are losing their privacy to this type of surveillance.”

In some states, government surveillance doesn’t stop once you leave the toll booth. The Missouri Department of Transportation has a pilot project in which it accesses cell phone companies’ records of phones passing by towers located along highways. The states say this is a low-cost way to monitor traffic patterns and look for bottlenecks. The companies involved say that the records are anonymous and scrubbed of personally identifying information.

But because the companies involved retain the right to change the contract at any time, privacy advocates say there is no guarantee that this data won’t be misused in the future. In San Francisco, the city council rejected using cell phone data because of concerns that it may invade privacy, and instead spent $35 million to install roadside scanners.

The concern is less about traffic monitoring as it is with other ways such data could be used. For example, researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology are looking into ways to use students’ cell phone location data to infer a variety of personal details, such as whom they’re friends with. As such behavioral models become more advanced, they could also be used to predict where students like to shop and what products they’d like to buy.

“In the world of data mining, the general belief is that if the data is there, the miners will come,” says Tien. “As these technologies become cheaper, all of their benefits and their dangers will rise.”

Precisely because the new generation of tracking technologies has so many potential uses, it’s impossible to say which technologies are beneficial and which invade privacy. In reality, they all have the capability to do both. But at the moment, all of these new technologies and uses are dealt with ad hoc. Corporations, government and consumers generally push to expand the use of individual technologies for specific uses – easing traffic flow, for example, or connecting with friends – while privacy advocates combat the uses they find objectionable.

What is lacking so far is an overview that looks at all these new technologies collectively and recognizes them for what they are: A vast increase in the power to monitor human activities that heretofore remained mostly private. And beyond such generalities as the Fourth Amendment and subsequent legal decisions defining what privacy meant in a previous technological age, we have no rules, no line in the sand saying: You may surveil up to this point, but no farther.

The scientists, marketers and users who continue to pioneer new uses for these technologies are not going to stop. Nor should they. It is up to us as citizens, rather than as consumers, to have this conversation, to draw the boundaries, to write the rules. In so doing, we must remember Tanya Rider trapped at the bottom of a ravine. We also must remember why protection against unreasonable searches and seizures was among the reasons our forefathers fought for independence.

“It’s up to policy makers to recognize that we value our privacy,” Balber says, “and to protect it.”