Phone Companies Grappling with Privacy Issues Related to Geo-Fencing

It might have happened to you already, perhaps at the mall. As you walk towards a department store, you suddenly receive a text message alerting you to a sale the store is having on some certain products. It noted your presence by the tell-tale signal sent from your cellphone, to a cell tower; even if you weren't talking on the phone at the time. The question though, is this an invasion of your privacy? Consumer Action thinks so, they've written up a piece on the story, alerting users to this new possible invasion of their personal space.

George Avalos isn't quite as convinced, he's written a more in-depth article for his home newspaper the Oakland Tribune that has been picked up and reprinted in several other papers, such as the Silicon Valley journal, Mercury News. In that article, Avalos points out that similar technology has been in existence for quite some time. Health monitors worn by elderly patients for example, or the OnStar system that helps stranded motorists. The difference here he says, is a matter of semantics. In some cases customers sign up and pay for a monitoring service. If a service provider, such as AT&T, who is fervently working on such a system, called ShopAlerts, first asks permission from phone customers to send ad messages, that would seem to make the whole thing okay, wouldn't it?

It's hard to say, because it seems such a system would be ripe for abuse by the same sorts of people who resort to sending spam messages in email. Who's to say that once a system is in place, providers such as AT&T won't sell it to someone else who is less concerned about customer privacy?

Unfortunately, it seems it's all more likely a matter of when, then if. One ominous sign is the fact that it already has an industry wide recognizable name, geo-fencing. Worse it may not be limited to phone service providers; apparently, again, according to Avalos, the folks at Twitter are already hard at work trying to figure out a way to have such ads sent to user Twitter accounts. Also, it doesn't seem like much of a stretch for companies that already have permission to send ads to user accounts, to do so automatically when they see they a customer is in the nearby vicinity; without asking for additional permission.

As such systems are put in place, users will have to figure out for themselves whether to give permission to be targeted, and if so, who to go about filtering them.