Never Be Lost Again (Even if You'd Rather Be)

Much of our newfound ability to tell stories with maps and computers in this context is motivated by the immediate and ongoing knowledge of our exact location with various emerging location-finding technologies. First among these is the satellite-based Global Positioning System, for which one can now find consumer-grade receivers in electronics stores and even outdoor supply shops for less than 0. Originally a military technologyas the Internet itself wasGPS can be used to passively fix a terrestrial location to typically five meters or less, and sometimes to within centimeters. GPS tracklogs and waypoints can make a rich record from which to tell our narratives.

While other devices such as cell phones and PDAs are now also incorporating GPS receivers, satellite reception indoors, or in dense urban or even outdoor settings, can be weak at best. Some commercial wireless networks are carriers that track the locations of users' mobile telephones and digital devices by calculating signal strength and direction from various cell towers. These techniques triangulate location based on calculations from several radio towers .

The United States law called E911 (for emergency 911 services) requires that carrier networks routinely track the location of mobile phones in order to provide emergency services. Since tracking is mandatory, E911 is fundamentally intrusive . Network operators and public agencies always know a user's location. E911 also enables some carriers to offer phone location information, as a paid service to end- user applications.

So far, most carriers are not providing this information to subscribers themselves . Those that do are providing location coordinates, for premium prices, to enable enterprise services such as tracking fleet vehicles, delivery trucks , and freight movement. Vendors of high-end phones are beginning to offer APIs to developers to build new location-aware applications, and some carriers are beginning to offer location-based services to consumers built on these capabilities.

At the University of California San Diego, at Carnegie Mellon, and at dozens of other universities with thousands of Wi-Fi base stations and known locations, engineers have created client-side software to calculate user location via this method. Several commercial vendors are now offering very precise indoor Wi-Fi-based location services for enterprise network applications, such as conditional security access and warehouse management, among others. In addition, Internet-based volunteer groups have already mapped hundreds of thousands of base station locations by "wardriving" with GPS and Wi-Fi enabled laptops. Corporate research labs at companies such as Intel and Microsoft have publicly revealed their work on geolocation software based on Wi-Fi station location. Soon, both open source and proprietary software will make it trivial for users of Wi-Fi devices to know where each other are.

Location sensing will eventually be spectrally independent (that is, not limited to the Wi-Fi spectrum). Software that listens to television and radio signals to calculate location is already beginning to emerge. Radio and television transmission towers have publicly known locations; the new digital television broadcasts also have a digital timestamp. This timestamp allows devices to triangulate location by comparing timestamps, much like the ones GPS satellites provide from orbit , and commercial interests are already using this technique to provide geolocation services. Whatever signals a device is listening to, it will eventually be able to figure out where it is and whether the signals are radio, Wi-Fi, cellular, GPS, or television.

Ultimately, location-sensitive applications might use microsensors and RFID tags that rely on both active client software and passive techniques. These small integrated circuits will be connected to antennas and respond to an interrogating radio signal. They will supply simple identifying information, including location coordinates. When queried, the RFID tag will return such location information as latitude and longitude, effectively serving as a digital survey stake.

All this means that, at least, one might need never be lost in a strange place againunless one wants to be, by turning off the electronic device. Certainly, it seems that the serendipity of being lost, the freedom to be open to the unknown and unexpected, may itself be lost. What's more, if we ourselves are never lost, then we can also be found by others. The technology to form gleefully Dadaist flashmobs is also potentially the weapon of the unwanted stalker, or of an authoritarian political regime .