Passive Tracking -- Tracking Employees Passively

by C. Enrique Ortiz, July 1, 2005

I know, the subject is a bit confusing. Let me explain what I mean. As you may know I am big on location-based services (LBS), but not on tracking people; so don't geofence me! Some time ago I even wrote some guidelines for LBS developers that all mobility developers should read, and follow...

In any case, the ability to know where people are may be useful in certain applications. So how can we offer this "benefit" to our customers without violating the privacy of the end-users? Again, how can we do tracking in an honorable, rightful way? Well, doing the right thing is not as hard as you might think and consist of:

  • Following the guidelines mentioned above (and for your convenience, listed below)
-together with -
  • Tracking people indirectly or passively!

Tracking people indirectly? But what is that? Tracking people indirectly is the same as tracking people passively; instead of using techniques such as geofencing, or active monitoring where the location of individuals are transmitted and recorded continuously, your applications should only provide such location information during certain explicit situations. Let me give an example: a workforce application provides work order dispatching and fulfillment. To maximize dispatching/fulfillment, the application uses LBS. What I advocate is that instead of capturing coordinates continuously, these coordinates are only captured for example when the employee gets to the destination, where the customer is. This will provide less sample-points (the last known location would be the location of the last visited customer), but enough for any application that needs location data to calculate who should go where next. Then from the reporting side, this location information would be available when querying for the status of the particular work order, and if querying the status of am employee, the last known location (the last customer's location) would be displayed.

In summary, follow the guidelines, and use passive tracking...

The Guidelines for LBS Developers:

  • Present a privacy note: the user must be notified that the application collects, records and transmits personal (location) information.
  • This privacy notice must be properly localized (i.e. right language for the particular country) and must be explicit.
  • This privacy notice must be displayed and acknowledge, at least once (probably the first time the application is used). This acknowledgement must be recorded.
  • This privacy notice should be re-displayed every once in a while, lets say once a month, or once a quarter, or something that is configurable, but the notice should never be disabled.
  • The client application must provide the means to turn off "location tracking" at ANY time. Always give the device-user the ultimate decision for being tracked or not!
  • Location information and other personal information, if stored on the device, must be safeguarded: 1) not accessible by other programs or entities, 2) and possibly encrypted.
  • Location information and other personal information, if transmitted, must be properly encrypted.
  • And if stored on the server, must be totally safeguarded.
  • If possible, use passive tracking

 

ceo

 

 

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