Far East Economic Review, Hong Kong 12 Dec 2002 Spy Phone - You can run but you can’t hide, because your mobile phone can signal your location We've accepted videocameras in elevators, management reading our e-mails and dog tags dangling around our necks. Now, thanks to a Hong Kong company, bosses can track our movements via our mobile phones. The Location Company's service, dubbed WorkPlace, uses Hutchison Telecommunications' network of base stations to track the signals from mobile phones using the technical standard known as GSM, or Global System for Mobile communications. An employee's location is shown on a map on a computer screen at his or her company's premises. If it's any consolation to employees being tracked, you can see on the cellphone screen when you're being monitored, and, if you dare, you can also turn the system off. The Location says it has signed up about a dozen clients since launching the service in Hong Kong in August. WorkPlace won't appeal to many workers. It's perhaps best suited for logistics and service companies who need to send the nearest employee to a site as fast as possible, or who need to tell a customer a definite time when Joe Handyman is actually going to show up. And it's good for security companies wanting to make sure their rent-a-cops are on site. Hong Kong's Watson's Water is trying out WorkPlace with its team of 15 technicians who maintain and fix water-coolers located at customer premises. Chris Atkins, Watson's general manager, says that from August to September the technicians' productivity improved by 7%-10% as a result of the service. Typically the start-up cost is about HK$3,000 ($385) per worker, not counting the cost of the switching service providers if you don't already use Hutchison, plus a minimum monthly fee of HK$50. Atkins estimates that based on Watson's usage patterns, it will be paying monthly fees of around HK$220 per service technician. So if WorkPlace ratchets up productivity without costing much, the factor left to consider is the freakiness of having Big Brother watching you. THE AIM'S EFFICIENCY, BOSSES SAY After volunteering to test the service, it occurred to me that I'm not the ideal worker to be tracked. Why not just inject a microchip into our necks? The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to outrun the electronic spies - hopping on a ferry to an outlying island where the signal would be too weak to reveal my location. True, the system is only accurate to within about 50-200 metres of where you really are, so no one is tracking visits to the toilet. But then, vagueness can be misleading too. When my cellphone was connected to the tracking system at my office building in Wanchai, a section of Hong Kong notorious for girlie bars, I appeared on the computer-screen map to be on a road where go-go dances gyrate, rather than in the staid tower where I slog away. Great: The bosses check in, and it appears as if I'm savouring a drink at a nearby bar instead of typing a story. "Most employers say they don't want to spy - they know you're going to go get a coffee. They just want to be more efficient," say Anthony Houlahan, Pinpoint's director of sales and business development. That may be true - unless the employer is looking to fire you, and is armed with a tracking system that saves location history indefinitely on the computer. And wait until the next service is on the market. close