26 | DECEMBER 2017
News
Read online at www.proinstaller.co.uk
TRACKING STAFF -
BIG BROTHER OR BIG
BREAKTHROUGH?
Owners of installer businesses can get some major benefits
using tracking. You can make sure that staff are where they
are supposed to be. You can confirm that vans are being
used correctly. If you do a high proportion of callouts, you
can use resources much more efficiently. What’s not to like?
Now looks at the ability to track
individuals and vehicles. panies to their knees while raising
others from nowhere. Alongside,
the smartphone has created a host
of new billionaires.
The progress of
technology Big brother is
alive and well
Technology has gone from
strength to strength in the last
few years, but this isn’t a new
phenomenon. Aqueducts, which
the Romans were famous for, is
a form of technology as is the
printing press. That latter innova-
tion revolutionised the world as it
made it so much easier to record
and then widely transmit knowl-
edge.
The new kid on the block is
possibly more revolutionary than
anything that has come before.
That’s because smartphones are
the fastest adopted technology
in the world’s history. They have
gone from first being introduced
in the common form of a large
touch screen with no keyboard in
2007 (that was with the intro-
duction of the iPhone). Then in
just ten years they have gone to
being owned by billions of people
around the planet.
There are many impacts from
smartphones such as the abili-
ty for a president to tweet their
thoughts to their followers at any
time of day or night; now most of
the world’s knowledge is available
at any time and on the move; they
have brought some powerful com- “It may no longer be an exag-
geration to say that big brother
is watching,” says the Stanford
University Law web site. Carne-
gie Mellon University went even
further when it showed how much
can be learned about a person’s
life just from their Twitter feed.
Not everyone uses Twitter, but
Facebook also makes a lot more
information available than we
might imagine.
What’s even less well known is
that it’s been possible to track mo-
bile phones for years, even before
GPS capability was added. Mobile
phone companies have always
been able to ‘triangulate’ move-
ments of phones using multiple
phone towers. In fact, if you ever
send a text, send an email, use a
payment card, carry a phone in
your pocket, post on Facebook, In-
stagram or Snapchat, you are often
giving the game away about what
you are doing. Judging by the
billions of people that do these
things, most don’t care.
You can argue that this is all
very intrusive. There is also an
argument that only people that are
up to no good really worry about
being tracked.
Benjamin Dyer of Powered
Tracking using
smartphones
Smartphones are now cheap and
ubiquitous and it’s not far off the
truth to say that everyone has one.
Since a GPS and data connection
has been added, tracking is much
more accurate, and apps can do
the tracking as well as the mobile
phone companies.
As was discussed earlier, this
isn’t entirely new. However, none
of it was easy in the past. The
biggest application came from
law enforcement tracking people’s
movements. That tended to be in
connection with serious crimes.
Virtually all technology is neu-
tral, but the way it’s used can be
either good and bad.
Nuclear power is a good exam-
ple. The sun, which we can’t live
without, is nuclear powered as
its light and heat is the result of
continuous nuclear fusion. Nuclear
power may be the means that can
eventually take us to inhabitable
planets. Meantime, it provides the
capability for the human race to
wipe itself out. To illustrate the
point, some nations have been
rattling their sabres at one another
threatening nuclear destruction
even in the last year.
The smartphone is under intense
scrutiny for its involvement in dat-
ing (early research suggests it has
had a mostly good impact) through
grooming (bad) and influencing
elections improperly (also bad).
Tracking individuals
It’s necessary to keep an open
mind when it comes to the appli-
cation of tracking to individuals.
Like other technologies, there
can be good and bad applica-
tions.
Both myself and my business
partner travel a lot, exacerbat-
ed by the fact we live over one
hundred miles apart. We get to-
gether pretty frequently and the
‘Find friends’ on our iPhones has
saved us lots of texts and time.
It also saves lots of texting and
phone calls with my wife as well
as eliminating worries.
Let me give one simple and
fairly mundane use of this track-
ing. My business partner tries to
have a fresh cup of tea ready on
the table for the moment his wife
walks in the door after visiting
their grandchildren.
There are also now a range of
ways of protecting children with