Legal Commentary

I tend to lag behind technological advances.  This one, however, has me sputtering with incredulity.  We are all aware that our cell phones are miniature tracking devices.  But it had never occurred to me that people would pay for a service to use them as tracking devices ? voluntarily.  This WSJ article is an eye-popper for me.  The article begins: 

Would you want other people to know, all day long, exactly where you are, right down to the street corner or restaurant?

Unsettling as that may sound to some, wireless carriers are betting that many of their customers do, and they?re rolling out services to make it possible. 

Sprint, Verizon, and others are signing up ?hundreds of thousands of customers? who seem perfectly willing to allow others to track their location at any time.  This service is being driven by ?a generation of young people who are comfortable sharing a great deal of personal information on social-networking Web sites and eager for still more ways to stay connected.?  The article does highlight some of the privacy concerns, particularly regarding ?abuses? of the service that could occur through stalking, sexual predators, and criminal investigations (e.g., one service allows a user to send a false location as protection against stalkers). 

Perhaps I was too deeply impressed by a course in dystopian fiction as an undergraduate, but the possibility for governmental abuse seems substantial to me.  Even ignoring the strange problems of social control that exist when persons volunteer to participate in a system of social surveillance like this, as I understand current Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, what users voluntarily share with third parties, they also essentially make available to governmental officials (e.g., like the phone numbers one dials).  Add this to the Katz formula of social expectations, and it would seem the 18-24 year olds who like to watch each other?s every move are significantly altering social practice and therefore shifting all of our constitutional privacy protections.  I suppose one upshot is that parents will never have to ask ?where were you all afternoon? anymore (but neither will the inquiring government official).