Summary Response Week 8: Location

CPSC 601.25 Week 8 Part 1

Papers

In this response I will discuss a paper that presents a survey on parental attitudes to location tracking.

Big Brother/Parents?

In the last 20 years GPS has moved from a finicky military technology to a ubiquitous part of everyday life. More recently the technology has become cheap, effective and battery efficient enough to be included in mobile phones and in other devices. As any new technology advances, a host of social issues accompanies it. And the researchers attempted to explore some of these in the context of parental tracking of children. Rather then survey users of such systems, the authors decided to survey a collection of parents, and ask them about the technology. They found that an extreme minority of parents were tracking and that an general a minority were favourably inclined towards it.

Finem Respice

The authors, at this point in the paper, reveal that they clearly began with an end in mind. Comments such as the suggestion that parents are probably afraid for their children irrationally and that children who are punished are 'less likely to internalize the values of reliability and honesty' expose this bias. The authors are clearly not in favor of tracking. The authors (because they didn't talk to people who used tracking) didn't really explore the logic of parents who employ the technology. Consider, if a parent was simply worried about their child in general, a mobile phone is probably a good way to make sure they stay safe. If they don't trust the child not to disobey, what keeps the child using the personal tracking device in the first place? The authors also don't consider some other unintended consequences. It might be true that parents who use tracking allow their children to explore in their community more often and with more liberality then parents who don't use tracking but restrict their children to the home or near neighbourhood. Other factors such as rising crime, suburbanization, breakdown in social structures, etc probably have quite a bit to do with this issue.

Towards a good location awareness

Attitudes around sharing location are probably changing. Services such as Foursquare, Google Latitude, Find My Friends, etc ... are all voluntary and are quite popular. The 'Whereabouts' clock (originating in a Harry Potter novel) might be an example of a compromise solution between the desire for privacy and trust while still providing the reassurance people appear to want. The researchers raise some interesting points, but their finding are not ultimately interesting. That people are concerned about their children's safety and also in their privacy and trustworthiness is pretty much what you'd expect. As it becomes possible to have ubiquitous tracking on your mobile phone (a large leap just recently reached) it will be interesting to see how the social and cultural factors related to this issue change over time.