Tech gadgets can violate privacy

Tech gadgets are great, but little attention has been paid to privacy when it comes to issues like location-based systems such as GPS and electronic tags that help cars zip through toll booths.

In the future, locationial records may be used in ways that violate a person's privacy, recording who you are having lunch with, what meetings you are going to and where you are spending your free time. And for anyone using these gadgets as part of their job, it creates an even bigger privacy problem at the workplace.

An article by Peter Eckersley, staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates online privacy and free speech, outlines in an article in Business Week how to prevent unnecessary spying and the kinds of precautions that must be taken to prevent a person's habits from being recorded and misused.

Over the next decade, he says, systems that track and record our movement through physical space will be woven inextricably into everyday life.

"This is not a call to halt the development of location-based software, services, and gadgetry," he says. "We don't want to stop people from being able to find directions on pocket-sized digital maps, from getting recommendations for the best nearby café, or from seeing when their friends happen to be just around the corner. The new inventions are far too useful and cool for their development to be thwarted by fears about privacy."

He offers these pointers:

• These new gadgets must be designed from the ground up to include robust privacy protections and make sure public relations disasters never happen.
• Protecting privacy is good for business, and it's important to let your customers know that it is protected.

"Unfortunately for consumers, there aren't many gadgets today that offer locational services and locational privacy at the same time. So for the moment, when you look at that little GPS map in your pocket, you should assume it's looking back at you-and that it may share that data when asked," Eckersley adds.

For more on protecting privacy:
- see this Business Week article

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