Japanese officials are about to test a cellphone-based tracking system in an attempt to combat future pandemics. It's a bit like trying to solve the problem using good design, or with tricorders, just with much less civil liberty.
The idea is to run an experiment in a school, which is a classic public location where pandemics can easily gain a foothold. The students of the chosen school will be given special cellphones with GPS tracking units built-in--these will track the students location on a per-minute basis, and store the data in a central server. By randomly designating particular students as early infected carriers, and analyzing their movements, the research team will be able to identify which other students were exposed--those children's parents will receive an automated message to indicate they should take the child to a doctor.
It's basically an in-vivo experiment to see how effective such an alert system would be to prevent on-going infections in a pandemic situation. And it's likely to be pretty potent: One of the issues in an out-of control infectious situation is that carriers don't necessarily know if they've been exposed, and thus spread the disease further before developing symptoms. In such a situation, the location tracking would be a fabulous tool.
But if it's a successful experiment, and the scheme takes steps towards being implemented nationally, I hope at some point someone raises the issues of personal privacy. Because what each phone user is effectively doing is carrying an ultra-precise tracking tag around, for the government's benefit. It is indeed a powerful anti-pandemic measure, but at what price to civil liberty? Though the system would apparently be voluntary, according to government spokespersons, it's likely that there'd be a large take-up because people care for their health. And then at some point, you just know, that ultra-precise location database is going to be used for other purposes.
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Related Stories: | Topics:Innovation, Technology, Design, pandemics, swine flu, flu, infection, softbank, japan, tracking, gps, privacy, Twitter Inc., Google Inc., Law, Civil Rights, Constitutional Law |
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Recent Comments | 3 Total
June 8, 2009 at 1:50pm by David Osedach
Even if it ultimately works this sounds like a very costly endeavor.
June 8, 2009 at 7:06pm by A Batch
Cell phone GPS tracking is on the rise... social tracking like Google's Latitude enables you to keep track of a group, family, school party on a trip etc. However the social metaphor means everyone gets to see everyone else's location in the group. That's typicall not what you want in a business context.
Business tracking is better done where only a select few people can see and track, eg for transport dispatch, or lone worker (eg forestry workers) who might need emergency services. In these cases tracking is disclosed and part of the terms of employment, often integrated as a key enabler to improve efficiency or as a health and safety issue. An example of a low cost commercial GPS mobile phone tracker is www.Zerointracing.com who have real time tracking and history, where the tracking is mapped over google maps. Its pretty cool. A simple service that does 95% of what most SME's need for about 100th of the typical cost of an in-vehicle tracking system.
June 8, 2009 at 7:07pm by A Batch
oops typo in the web address, it should be www.zerointracking.com appologies