Cheap and accessible GPS-based technology is offering individuals and businesses a range of new capabilities that would have been the stuff of science fiction just a few years ago, but its increasing use for surveillance-related activity is also sending chills down the spines of privacy advocates.

"No one ever argued that there weren't good uses for much of the technology which has privacy concerns," said Richard Rosenberg, a professor emeritus of computer science at the University of British Columbia and president of BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association. "The problem is, it's sold on the basis of what might be a good use."

Quick Facts

Commercially available remote GPS receivers that cost less than $350 and offer battery life of about a month are now smaller than a cellphone.

GPS receivers the size of a $1 coin and designed to plug into a laptop computer sell for as little as $50.

Trackers small enough to be hidden on bicycles are being used to catch bike thieves.

GPS, short for global positioning system, is based on a series of satellites that ring the globe, sending out signals indicating their position. GPS receivers, now small enough to build into cellphones and other tiny gadgets, compare the signals from several of these satellites to triangulate their position. If the receiver is moving, it can also calculate its heading and speed.

Whether you are a parent who wants to track your teenager when they're out for the night in the family car, a person calling for an ambulance on a GPS-equipped cellphone, or a business seeking more operational efficiency, it is easy to see how knowing a person's precise location provides many advantages.

For example, knowing the location of your teenaged daughter is a good thing in case she has car trouble or is involved in an accident.

But consider the other side of the coin: Are the details about her movements secure? In other words, is there any guarantee that someone within the GPS service company won't use that information for evil or illegal purposes, or that a hacker can't access the system?

And no one can argue that being easily located when you call 911 from a GPS-equipped cellphone is of great benefit. But how long does the GPS provider keep the log of those movements, and what's the data being used for the rest of the time?

There are many questions that arise when people start leaving GPS trails behind wherever they go. Can the information be used to investigate your daily routines, or by others who want to track your movements without your direct permission? Is a marketing company able to purchase the data to try and discern your buying habits so they can fine-tune their sales pitches?

Privacy: A matter of opinion

Stephen Marmura is a post-doctoral researcher at the Queen's University Surveillance Project, a group that studies how personal data is processed and used in Canada, and the resulting social, political and economic consequences. Marmura believes that before people are able to decide whether the benefits of GPS technology outweigh the privacy risks, they need to be sure about who has access to the information and how it might be used.

"The most potentially dangerous thing for privacy in this, in terms of consumers and ordinary people, is not so much that they'll know where you are at a given point … but that there's more and more personal information out there in these systems, where it's not clear what the laws are or who owns the information or where it's going," Marmura said.

Many Canadians aren't aware of, or don't understand, the capabilities of current surveillance technologies and how they can be used, or what kind of data is being stored and for how long.

EKOS Research Associates submitted a report called Revisiting the Privacy Landscape a Year Later to the Canadian privacy commissioner in March 2006, which states: "Only half [of those surveyed] report they are confident they have enough information to know how new technologies might affect their personal privacy."

Decisions about privacy trade-offs are also affected by a person's own definition of what should be private. The EKOS report notes, "Canadians do not view all types of personal information as being the same."

Health information, for example, "is considered sacrosanct," the report found.

Age also seems to be a determining factor in the type of privacy concerns expressed by Canadians. On the whole, younger Canadians may be more willing trade privacy for the benefits that tracking technology like GPS provides, Marmura said.

"Young people seem to be more oblivious to privacy considerations … I think there's still a lot of the attitude out there that 'I have nothing to hide, so what's the problem? What are they going to find out they can't find out anyway?'" Marmura said.

UBC's Rosenberg cites the rise of tell-all online diaries such as those found on sites such as Myspace.com as a major contributor to this lack of concern.

"A lot of kids now have very little sensibility about privacy … because they're willing to share everything," he said.

"It's an amazing phenomenon. The worst fear I have is that we raise a generation accustomed to being monitored, accustomed to having their movements regularly kept track of."

Workplace concerns

Some employees in Canada are already tracked by their bosses through their use of GPS-equipped company vehicles, equipment and cellphones, or other types of surveillance such as through video cameras and keystroke-logging software.

Rosenberg said privacy advocates are concerned that while surveillance is on the increase, some employees don't fully grasp how they're being tracked. For others, it's a condition of employment that they agree to be monitored, and the definition of when they're on the job versus on personal time is an increasingly grey area as a result of technology that lets people work anywhere, anytime.

"The workplace now extends wherever you happen to be," he said.

Employee monitoring has yet to come to the attention of Canadian unions. Queen's Surveillance Project researchers, for example, found only 1.4 per cent of collective agreements in the federal government database in December 2005 had "enshrined clauses related to electronic monitoring and surveillance practices in the workplace."

Rosenberg said that we must start asking: "Is this something that can be demonstrably shown to improve the work environment, improve the quality of work, or is management doing it as an intimidation factor?"

Some are. Concern over civil liberties has led several Canadians to take companies to court over what they perceive to be unjust or unnecessary workplace surveillance. Since the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) came into effect Jan. 1, 2004, there have been seven cases relating to workplace monitoring, most having to do with video cameras. But there have been none relating specifically to GPS technology so far.

The future of privacy in Canada

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner is currently asking for recommendations to update PIPEDA, including issues such as how GPS-related tracking information should be safeguarded, archived and used by companies. This includes information gathered about the movements of both employees and customers.

Rosenberg welcomes the move.

"I don't think we have in the federal law a sufficient understanding of what kind of information can be gathered by not just global positioning, but other types of technologies, and whether that information gathered is subject to privacy protection under the federal or provincial laws. I think these are open areas."

[an error occurred while processing this directive]