Ellen is in charge of the company-issued cellphones at work. All the field employees are issued cellphones, and Ellen keeps track of billing, repairs, and technical problems. She receives all the electronic records regarding phone use.
One day Ellen is on the phone with Frank in the cellular provider's tech support, tracking down a problem with three phones last week. The conversation goes something like this:
Ellen: But doesn't this field here have something to do with
the phone's serial number? I notice it's the same for each call
made on the same phone.
Frank: No, no, that field is the GPS coordinates for where
the call was placed.
The latitude starts in column 54, and the longitude follows.
If each phone in your set has the same numbers, it must be because each phone
is consistently used in the same place.
Ellen: That would be about right in for these particular phones ....
Frank: But I bet if you checked
records of more phones you'd see ... actually, I probably wasn't
supposed to tell you any of this; never mind.
After hours, Ellen thinks hard about what Frank said. She plays around with a little java, and within two days has a way of taking a set of phone records and generating a googlemaps plot of where each call originated. Ellen is tickled to see her own phone show up at her office, at the restaurant where she had lunch, at the grocery store, and at her home.
The following week Ellen hears that there's a new policy on
regularly reporting your location; clearly management would be
interested in this feature. But then Ellen is struck by some concerns. The first is whether or not management would notify
anyone that they can track employees by cell-phone usage; she really
doesn't want to be the person who brought surreptitious monitoring to
her workplace. The second concern is that the monitoring would be
retroactive; she discovers
that the GPS coordinates have been in the
billing records for almost a year. And she's heard rumors that this
information
could get some people in trouble. And while she doesn't have any
evidence yet, she's afraid that if she gets a manager in trouble then she will be in trouble too.