GPS should evolve into a helpful tool, not an overbearing leash

by Cody Kitaura

Our makeshift search party lay spread around the room, the exhausted four of us sprawled across the couches. The sun was barely up, and we had found our missing friend after about an hour of looking. Or, rather, he had found us.

“Hey, babe,” he had said casually as he called his girlfriend and said he was ready to come home. She was, understandably, less calm.

She had been crying, sure that this was his way of breaking up with her – leaving in the middle of the night, leaving behind his two dogs and everything he had brought with him to the party that night.

His explanation: He had passed out in the field of a nearby elementary school during a late-night drunken walk.

His answer had the same calm demeanor he always carried, but he didn't look as cold as I imagined someone who had just spent a few hours lying in a field in a thin white sweatshirt and painter's hat would. I didn't bother to question his explanation, but his girlfriend, curled up and arms crossed, seemed to feel differently.

Perhaps she still carried the same suspicion she had woken me up with at about 3 a.m. – that he was with another girl. I had struggled to calm her with my groggy words, my thoughts slurred by exhaustion. I had told her how I saw him leave after giving directions to the house to someone over the phone. She had cried onto my shoulder, pouring out a thousand impossible questions and dialing his cell phone repeatedly.

As I wondered if we would ever know the truth behind what he had really done that night, a friend who had driven out from Downtown to help in the search offered a revelation as he poked at his new cell phone.

“If we all had iPhones, we could link them together and see where we all were on a map.”

Of course, if the missing friend's story was true, a GPS tether of some kind would have helped us find him. But if his girlfriend's hunch was right and he hadn't wanted to be found, he would have just turned off the GPS device and we'd have been no better off.

But we shouldn't really need GPS devices or other surreptitious technology to help us hunt down our friends and check their stories. We should be able to trust their explanations. Technology can create great shortcuts and safety nets for rare situations like this, but is it really an area of our lives we want constantly mapped and monitored?

Do we want the role of technology in our lives to be more George Jetson or George Orwell? Do we want evolving tech like GPS to eventually end up as a helpful tool used occasionally when we get lost, or do we want it end up as a heavy-handed way of keeping tabs on our friends, family and employees?

Companies like T-Trac will allow you to track the movements of a car in real-time for about $50 a month. Since technology like this is useless if the person being tracked knows about it, the only way to use it properly is to hide the tracking bug, James-Bond-style.

GPS technology is great, and is useful for all kinds of navigational help, but as technology continues to evolve we'll continue to be faced with the choice of just how wired we want our daily lives to be. Will we live in a society based on trust and integrity, or will we have to plant GPS tracking devices in the clothing of our significant others (as Vanessa explains) to truly determine whether they spent the night lying in a field or lying in the arms of another lover?



(note from Cody): Here's an awesome video example of tech invading places it doesn't belong. I wanted to use it in this column but couldn't work it in: