Future/Limitations of GPS Systems

This week, we have read about how technology may have some limits, in not only physical capabilities but also from an ethical standpoint. GPS systems seem to pose a huge threat to ethics, so I will focus on this aspect of it.

We have all seen Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight", and one of the most pivotal moments of the film is near the end when a technology is developed that turns every ones cellular phone into a location device that can essentially see everything around the area of any individuals cell phone. Obviously this poses huge ethical threats, as each day we see cases and instances where our personal freedoms/privacy's are violated by the government. Even the individual words we speak (yelling 'fire' in a public place) are being controlled, imagine if someone had the knowledge of where everyone was, at all times? This clearly is an issue that needs to be addressed, and quickly. Now I realize that this is based purely off of a fictional movie and is a stretch at best that we will see such a technology in the near future, but it is not necessarily completely out of reach.

A similar issue like this came up in New York City, where the individual cab drivers were protesting (in 2007) the installment of GPS systems within their cabs. Their reasons included evasion of privacy, which is what my point is (source = http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2113899,00.asp). Obviously this is on a much smaller scale than what I previously discussed, but it seems as though each new step forward with gps technologies is seeing resistance from multiple areas. It will be interesting to see when the resistance levels are too much for the gps providers to ignore.

Throughout this course we have been touching on a lot of different angles and aspects of modern-day technology, from the origins of the computer to the limits/ethics of what these new 'toys' may bring us.