Our phones are getting smarter, but our chances of leading secret lives are diminishing. That is a summary of recent developments on the smart phone front.
Starting last week, sippers at Starbucks could begin paying for a Trenta by swiping their smart phones at scanners sitting next to cash registers.
For landliners, this behavior raises a number of questions. Such as: What is a Trenta, and why would anyone do this? The short answers are a Trenta is a mammoth (31 ounces) iced coffee drink, and using a phone to pay for coffee — the scan subtracts money from an already established account — is faster than pulling out a credit card or reaching for cash. It also has a certain digital panache, as do many of the coffee shops' customers. More than one third of them already use smart phones, Starbucks reports.
Smart phones have also begun working the produce aisles of some grocery stores. HarvestMark, a company based in California, has placed a new type of bar code sticker on fruits and vegetables. When a customer prowling a grocery store for ripe tomatoes scans one of these stickers with a smart phone, the history of that particular tomato, where it was grown and when it was picked, appears on the phone. This technology, according to a story in The Washington Post, is being used by more than 200 companies, including Kroger, which is applying the stickers to its private label of fruits and vegetables. Originally developed as a way to comply with new federal regulations making it easier to track the source of a food-borne illness, this technology might replace pinching the goods as a way to determine produce freshness.
The art and science of parking in the city could be revolutionized by smart phones, too. Apps promise to help beleaguered block-circlers to find open meters in places such as New York and San Francisco, and some cities have begun allowing drivers to feed the meter via cell phone. A man in Australia may have come up with an even better way — the "ParkPatrol" app allows users to report sightings of meter readers and to alert other users, who could rush out and plunk in another quarter or move their cars. Think of it as a high-tech version of flashing your headlights to alert motorists to a speed trap.
But instead of alerting people to the presence of the authorities, the likely more common scenario is for phones to help the authorities track citizens. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has formed a unit, the Cellular Analysis and Survey Team, that uses cell phone histories to track the movements of suspects. Recently the unit used cell phone records of a rogue New York City policeman to help convict him of a robbery in New Jersey. Testifying at the policeman's trial in Newark, N.J. last month, an FBI agent said the unit was providing training in cell phone tracking to law enforcement officers around the nation. The cell phone of a typical adult will reveal 20 to 55 locations during a day — enough, authorities say, to enable law enforcement officers to track a person's movements hour by hour.
Some privacy advocates contend that digging out cell phone records is as invasive as wiretapping telephone calls and that law enforcement authorities should be required to obtain a warrant before undertaking such activities. A 1986 federal standard allows prosecutors to obtain court orders for cell site logs simply by showing the tracking information is relevant and material to an ongoing criminal probe, not requiring the higher standard that it would turn up evidence of crime. The issue of cell phone records will probably end up being visited by United States Supreme Court.
Of course, some people voluntarily allow their phones to tell where they've been. The application Foursquare advertises that it allows users to "unlock your world" by telling them about all the friends, cool happenings and good restaurants nearby — with the promise that businesses might give them discounts for showing loyalty through frequent, tracked visits.
Some are arguing that the loss of privacy people are experiencing — and in some contexts, embracing — with the proliferation of smart phones and other technology should not be so shocking. Privacy and anonymity, they say, are relatively new concepts born of urbanization and industrialization that would have been foreign to our agrarian forebears. But the scale of our connectedness is certainly something new — it's one thing for everyone in a community to know each other's business, but another entirely for nameless, faceless corporations and bureaucracies to have access to the same information. The marriage of social media, smart phones and GPS technology can make our lives more convenient — and maybe even more fulfilling — but at a price that we may not yet understand.
