| Korean Madness |
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| Tuesday, 22 August 2006 | |||||
 May it be a matter of culture, or may it be due to the habit to the lack of space: the reason is still blurry, but over 4 million Koreans have subscribed to a service that can determine and track a cellular owner’s location. The companies promoting these services offer a wide range of possibilities to meet each user’s exigency: starting from the “$3-a-month-service” that will send a SMS with your coordinates to friends and family periodically while you’re travelling, to the “29-cents-a-day-service” that will send a SMS in case a person isn’t at a specified place at a certain time, and allows the tracker to see the person’s movement over the previous 5 hours.
Moreover there are services that allows parents to track back their children routes and services that broadcasts text messages to taxi drivers within few kilometre from the requiring customer.
Too many sale promotions? Not really...
The statistics released by the Korean Association of Information & Communication shoot any doubt: it has been a hit! Indeed since 2004, these services are growing by 74% annually, with revenues expected to triple in 2007. So it seems that Korea is at the forefront: actually this kind of technology was introduced in the U.S.A. , in Japan and in the U.K. as well, but it didn’t spread out as in the Asian country where being tracked has become as normal as sending an SMS. The override of personal privacy doesn’t seem to worry them: the apparently increased security of letting others know where they are, seems to be worth the trade off. But we can’t do without being astonished by the fact that so many people could trust technology so much that they are available to became slaves …As if they could avoid disasters and accidents just by controlling and being controlled. The growing vicious circle of trackers and tracked, urged Seoul Government to undertake some measure to protect costumer’s privacy, indeed it was approved a law that requires a government license for all companies gathering such location information. Then, licensed companies can only share information with people designed by those being tracked, and tracked people can decide to temporarily cut off the service whenever they want. This measure is undoubtedly praiseworthy, but it sounds like an absurdity that in such a developed country there’s still such a low level of privacy-care that it is government itself that has to intervene and prevent citizens to consciously throw away part of their freedom.
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