One [service], costing $3 per month, will send a message with your coordinates to friends and family periodically while you're traveling. Another will automatically dispatch a text message to friends who get within a block or so of each other as they move around town. Yet another, costing 29 cents a day, will send a message if a person isn't at a specified place at a certain time and then allows the tracker to see the person's movements over the previous five hours. And 20,000 parents pay $10 per month for alerts if their children stray from the route between school and home. The Korea Association of Information &; Telecommunication reckons such services are growing by 74% annually, with revenues expected to triple in 2007, to $1.54 billion, from $500 million last year.
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Korea, though, is clearly at the forefront -- and not just for consumers. Hwang Yoon, who runs a call center for 1,500 taxi drivers, uses a service that broadcasts text messages to cabdrivers within a one-, two-, or three-kilometer radius of a fare's location. The first driver who responds -- by pushing a button on the phone -- gets the job. "This technology is an excellent and cheap fit for us," says Hwang. Sales of business-related tracking services in Korea are expected to jump more than fivefold this year, to $248 million, from $43 million last year.
Even so, the 1984 feel of some of these services has prompted Seoul to step in to ensure customers' privacy. In December, the National Assembly approved a law that requires a government license for all companies gathering such location information. Companies with licenses can only share that information with people designated by those being tracked, and those individuals are ensured access to detailed records of all requests for tracking. They can also opt out of the service any time or decide to slip away temporarily by selecting a "hide" option on their phones.
There is no mention in the article of whether the "hide" option can be overridden by authorities to trace, for example, a kidnapping victim. Doing so would obviously raise many privacy issues, but it would also give users the comfort that someone could find them if they were reported missing. It's reasonable to suppose, after all, that anyone that signs up for the tracking service in the first place would want to be tracked under those circumstances.
The technology is making inroads in other areas of the world, albeit slowly. The article notes that only one cell-tracking company in the US (called Teen Arrive Alive) has been able to get into the US cell carriers. I wonder if the slow adoption in the US is due to apathy (i.e., "I don't care where my friends are right now") or due to privacy fears (i.e., "I don't want my friends to know where I am right now"). It will be interesting -- and telling -- to see the adoption rate in the US five years from now.
