A service in Hong Kong called “Follow Me, Follow You” (maybe they could get Alan Partridge as celebrity spokesman) is apparently being used by tens of thousands of people to track their spouse’s movements, according to news reports.
The service, offered by 3HK, sounds like your typical friend-finder application, and requires users to get authorization from those people whose location they want to track. While this seems like a reasonable safeguard, it probably wouldn’t present much of a problem for a suspicious spouse to get hold of their significant other’s handset and give the authorization without their knowledge.
I have to think that this really isn’t that big a problem, but it’s a great angle to hang a news story on. Still, it doesn’t do much to help with the growing privacy backlash that all sorts of companies — mobile operators included — will have to contend with in the coming months.
It is quite scary when you think on how this service could be abused. Hopefully there is a proper admin interface available where users can verify and re-authorise such approved trackers.