What is it with people who work in Location Based Services? Either they’re insensitive, lack any form of emotional intelligence or they’re just plain stupid. You decide.

First we have Aligo CEO Robert Smith jumping in with his size 9’s, narrowly managing to avoid suggesting beating employees who aren’t where they should be. Then we have the sickly named TeenArriveAlive which in case you missed their message, means that if you put one of their stickers on your car and pay $10 a month, your kid won’t be killed while driving - talk about attempted emotional blackmail.

Now we have Gizmodo reporting on a sweet little quote from cuddly Xora CEO Sanjay Shirole. Good ole Sanjay says about employees being not where they’re meant to be:

There’s no electro shock–yet,”

As Gizmodo says:

The only thing classier than creating a technology that will eventually be used to tie workers into virtual corrals - I’m not joking, it’s in the article; called “geofences” - is to make a joke about using the system to abuse workers. Hilarious!

Don’t get me wrong - LBS tracking can make businesses much more efficient in all sorts of ways. But checking up on employees isn’t the USP of these services. And any company planning to use them to spy on employees has de facto got itself a serious staff problem.