Comment Articles

Cellphones betray your every move

Declan McCullagh CNET News

Published: 19 Aug 2003 13:55 BST

Copps is right. Congress should have stayed out of the location privacy debate in the first place. After all, the wireless market is intensely competitive. And if one company becomes too intrusive with GPS-enabled ads, others will be happy to seize the opportunity to offer more reasonable alternatives. But now that Congress has acted, it would be helpful for businesses and consumers to know what the law actually means.

"Nobody knows," said David Sobel, general counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Centre. "We said at that time that these were open questions that the commission should address. And we even said that if they determine that the coverage of the requirements was only limited to cellphones, that they should recommend to Congress that there should be a technology-neutral privacy standard for all location technology. They declined to do that. That confusion remains."

Meribeth McCarrick, a spokeswoman for the FCC, told me on Thursday that the agency could not comment on a pending proceeding. "I cannot speculate what we will do with the comments we receive, since the comment deadline hasn't passed and we're in the middle of establishing a record at this point," she said.

Until the FCC acts, there's always the self-help technique. A company named MobileCloak is selling for $24 (£15.09) a nifty frequency-deadening pouch, in which you can put your wireless device when you really, really don't want to be tracked by anyone at all.