No hiding from the boss

Advances in GPS-enabled handsets have taken a worrying turn for the UK’s road warriors

I think it’s time to market my “personal Faraday cage” for truant executives. It’s easy: you make a call to your office and, halfway through, you gently slide the phone inside the wire mesh-woven bag, and the boss thinks you’ve dropped out of coverage.

For the past few days, I’ve been busy reporting on BlackBerry Tracker. One day soon your boss could be using this system to work out whether you’re where you ought to be. Finally, all the technology strands are coming together to make a workable system that managers can establish as part of the office routine. And, as some have noticed, you can even put Tracker on your Facebook pages, and thus get caught visiting addresses that your family would be surprised to see you at.

Things have certainly advanced in the five years since I wrote a column about Microsoft’s MapPoint. I was admiring the contrast between that and Streetmap, and never once imagining that Microsoft would eventually be forced to buy Streetmap rival Multimap to catch up with a technology that didn’t even exist at the time, namely Google Maps.

“Within a decade,” I recall burbling cheerily, “it will be impossible to vanish, unless you strip down to your birthday suit and carry no electronics. We will all be trackable, everywhere. Except on the beach.”

At that time, the bottleneck seemed to be the maps themselves. Previous attempts to make geo-databases ubiquitous foundered on the need to buy and maintain the cartographic software. But solve one problem, and you find the next: entering the data.

GPS-based mobile phones cracked that. Unless you’re on the Tube, they know where you are, and can report back.

Actually, the next big thing in this area will be fake GPS satellites, which you will be able to program to show a journey you didn’t actually take. Get into your PseudoGPS-equipped vehicle, shut the screened windows, and then the record will show that you drove straight to your next appointment, even though you actually went for a swim.