SALON

Randy Dotinga

Tuesday, Jun 11, 2002 7:30 PM UTC

Stalker tech

Students at the University of California at San Diego are tracking their friends' locations with PDAs.

By

Topics:

It’s 11 p.m. Do you know where your boyfriend is? If he attends the University of California at San Diego, finding him may be as easy as turning on a PDA.

The university is equipping hundreds of students with personal digital assistants that allow them to track each other’s location from parking lot to lecture hall to cafeteria. The technology is sophisticated enough to pinpoint where a person is in a building — say, a dorm — within a margin of error of one floor.

No one is forcing students to use the $549 Hewlett-Packard Jordana PDAs, which are provided for free, or requiring them to allow their buddies to watch them wander across campus on a zoomable map. But students still worry about protecting themselves from stalkers, university administrators, FBI agents and nosy parkers.

“I don’t necessarily want even my friends knowing where I am,” says Ben Shapiro, a 22-year-old senior who is designing the project’s privacy rules. “Maybe students aren’t out of the closet and don’t want people to know they’re going to the Gay & Lesbian Resource Center. Maybe you’re cheating on your girlfriend and you don’t want her to know you’re in somebody else’s dorm room. It’s creepy Big Brother.”

Shapiro is no stranger to speaking his mind. In his freshman year, he and the ACLU successfully sued UCSD after he got in trouble for posting a handwritten sign that said “Fuck Netanyahu and Pinochet” on his dorm room window. But Shapiro actually likes the location-tracking software despite his misgivings. “If the system has enough protections for people’s privacy and enough people use it, it could be really great,” he says.

The official goal of the PDA project is to test whether location trackers will encourage students to find each other more easily on a sprawling and rapidly growing campus. “What used to feel like a small town is starting to feel like a big city,” said William Griswold, a computer science professor who is overseeing the project.

The PDAs detect each other through the university’s Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity) network, the same radio wave-based system that allows lap-toppers to go online from coffeehouses and airports.

The location-tracking software itself, developed by a 15-year-old student at the university, draws upon triangulation technology used by global positioning system (GPS) devices. The PDAs figure out their locations by comparing the strength levels of signals traveling from the devices to various Wi-Fi antennas.

The software only allows a person to track the location of another user if both agree. If Shapiro doesn’t want his best friend to track him, he can leave him off his PDA’s equivalent of an America Online “buddy list.” According to Griswold, the location data is protected by the standard SSL Internet encryption technology.

But critics are skeptical. “They have created a security risk for every single student who uses the software,” says Nick Van Borst, a 25-year-old senior majoring in world literature who criticized the tracker system in a university magazine. “People are hacking things on campus all the time, and there’s always these crazy viruses going around. Somebody’s going to want to (hack) it just for the hell of it to see if they can.”

Hackers don’t even need to be on the campus to invade the PDA location tracker system. Students can log in to a Web site from anywhere and check where their friends are. The system offers both a zoomable map of the campus — with moving dots representing their friends — and a text list of where people are. If students program their PDAs properly, their buddies can also track their locations around the world whenever they log into a Wi-Fi network.

System administrators can gain access to the locations of students or employees equipped with the PDAs, although designers hope to eventually make that impossible. Law enforcement officers could also conceivably try to track someone without their knowledge, but “it’s not our intention to be a party to activities like that,” Griswold says.

The PDA project will get bigger. UCSD has a few dozen more donated PDAs to give away to students, and it hopes to equip 330 freshmen with them this fall when it opens a sixth mini-college on campus.

Hewlett-Packard, which has provided the PDAs for free, wants to know what college students do with the devices, Griswold says. “What 18- or 20-year-olds will do with these PDAs today is what 35-year-olds will be doing with them tomorrow.”

That’s what worries privacy advocates who are already monitoring the growing use of location-tracking GPS microchips in cellphones.

Trouble looms around the corner “even if there’s a rock-solid privacy policy, even if certain safeguards are built in,” says Beth Givens, director of the San Diego-based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. “Whenever someone develops a new service that uses personally identifiable information, there will be in the future other uses found for that information. You can count on it.”

UCSD officials contend that students know what they’re getting into. The PDA project is an experiment so users must sign waivers before using the devices, Griswold said. “The approach we’ve taken is to put control into the hands of the user and explain to them what it means. The students at this university are very bright, and we expect them to all be able to understand the things we say to them.”

Some students don’t even bother looking at the waiver. They turn down the new technology for a very old-fashioned reason. “They’re afraid that if they break them, we’ll charge them for it,” Griswold said.

For now, at least, both their pocketbooks and their privacy will remain intact.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Loaded terminology like "entitlements" and "welfare" skews the debate and alters America. How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government.
345 points346 points | 114 comments
vote
How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government -- "...much of the U.S. economic security support system consists of subsidies for the affluent in the form of tax breaks, like those for private retirement savings plans such as 401(k)s and private employer-provided health insurance."
64 points65 points | 3 comments
vote
Temple Grandin on DSM-5: “Sounds like diagnosis by committee.” When it comes to autism, Grandin argues we're paying too much attention to labels -- and not enough to individuals
36 points37 points | 2 comments
vote
Temple Grandin on DSM-5: “Sounds like diagnosis by committee.” When it comes to autism, Grandin argues we're paying too much attention to labels -- and not enough to individuals
34 points35 points | 3 comments
vote
Doug Henwood: Capitalism Thrives on Class Exploitation
36 points37 points | 4 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations