Big Brother Knows Where You Are

It's called social mapping, and it means that people can tell where you are through your cell phone connection. You see it on television shows all the time. CSI investigators locate criminals without a problem, don't they? It doesn't work exactly like that in real life for citizens like our students and us. To use social mapping, the software has to be loaded onto phones (or computers, in some cases) and users must specify who they will allow to locate them. They also can tell the software to reveal their exact location or perhaps only that they are in a certain city. Keep in mind that if the system uses GPS, the locating can be very accurate; if it's by phone towers, it can be miles off. Google is coming out with Latitude, a system that works with Google Maps, and there are other social mapping programs like Loopt and BrightKite. With the mapping programs, parents could keep track of where their children are and friends could find each other. —But when you consider the possible problems of pre-teens and teens with peer relationships and the worry that some young people might open their tracking to "friends" they don't really know, questions arise about this type of software. Could peer pressure cause some students to opt-in to tracking when it's not wise? Very likely.