It's 10 am on a Monday morning and your boss thinks you're attending a conference in Whitehall. Actually, you're at a job interview on the other side of London and won't get to the conference until midday, but she doesn't know that. Or does she? If your company has signed up to any of the new mobile-phone tracking services, which can pinpoint a user's location (to within 300 metres in some cases) your real whereabouts might be discovered.
Businesses have been tracking their non-human assets, usually with some form of vehicle-tracing technology, for years. These days, however, it is possible to track people through their mobiles and, after a couple of years of increasingly substantiated hype, the practice has finally taken hold. Paolo Pescatore, senior analyst at IT analysts International Data Corporation, thinks the trend will increase. "Over the next two years, there will be a greater need for location-based services," he says. These include ones you have heard of, such as GPS (Global Positioning Satellites), but there is also a new technological procedure on the market, called triangulation. This is a method of determining a person's locality by bouncing signals off three different telephone masts.
Mapminder.co.uk, a personalised mapping and navigation service, recently launched a phone location service called MapaPhone. With MapaPhone, employers can log on to the internet and track their employees online. According to Mapminder's MD, Emma Hardcastle, there has been a lot of interest from smaller companies. She says demand has partly been driven by the legislation introduced in December last year, which banned people from using their mobile phones while driving. "Phoning drivers is not practical now as they have to pull over to answer their phones," she says. That is what prompted Peter Smith, CEO of hearse supplier Binz UK, to use MapaPhone. Six weeks into the new service, he says it has already been very useful, enabling office based workers to keep track of where the sales team are and set up meetings with new clients. Despite some initial resistance from staff, he thinks they too now see the benefits. The office manager, Roberta Smith, is one of the people in charge of tracking the sales team and she finds it much more useful than she expected. "It means a bit more work for me in one sense, tracking the phones," she says. "But it also saves me time because I can find out where people are much more easily."
She doesn't have to keep calling sales people and leaving messages for them if they don't answer to find out where they are. She also thinks the technology makes her and the business look more professional because when customers ring up to ask the locality of a particular salesperson, she can tell them immediately.
Paul Toyne, director of Article 13, an organisation that focuses on business ethics and corporate social responsibility, thinks the technology could be a useful security measure. "Say, for members of staff working in areas of conflict," he says. "Or for people working for oil and gas companies in areas where there's a threat of kidnapping."
There are concerns, however, about the potential for abusing tracking devices. Employers will have to be careful how they implement the technology or employees could see it is an infringement of their rights. Human rights groups have warned that employers must inform any staff they wish to track that this is what they are doing or they could be acting illegally."There are issues of conflict with people's basic human rights. Sometimes people have a right for others not to know where they are."
Toyne recommends that anyone who is considering introducing such technology consult with employees first. Ground rules should be set stating what the tracking is to be used for and - just as importantly - what it is not to be used for.
The technology providers and mobile phone operators are fully aware of these issues. Vodafone has drawn up a code of conduct for users and Hardcastle says her company will not activate the tracking technology on an person's phone until they have their written consent. One of her own salespeople has expressed an unwillingness to be tracked as he goes about the country and Hardcastle has respected his wishes.
Roger Jones, business development manager at telephone company Avaya Communications, agrees with the salesman. "I don't think my exact location needs to be tracked," he says. Avaya has just started using "presence technology" whereby users can see when other fellow users are in work and available. "For example, as soon as a salesperson comes out of a meeting with a customer and switches their phone on, you can see they are available," explains Jones. He thinks it will soon take off in the business market.
The success and popularity of such devices is not just down to business leaders, though. Technology only works as well as users enable it to. Sometimes people do not want to be traced and not necessarily because they are somewhere they shouldn't be or doing something they shouldn't do. Many people feel technology has already made them too contactable, and that anything that makes them even more so will make working life unacceptably stressful. Which is when they can take matters into their own hands and simply switch their mobiles off.
