The Data Dot: Wireless Communications & Location Tracking — Part III

6 min readDec 12, 2022

With our final instalment on the topic of Wireless Communication & Location Tracking we turn the focus towards possible solutions and regulatory control to see where we stand in the fight for our privacy. Last week’s article was intended to cover more content but ended up being so long that we had to shift some over to this third and last edition.

Positive & Practical Use Cases

Smart Glasses
Smart glasses have been a hot topic throughout the better part of the last decade with the possibility of having science fiction become reality within the public’s grasp. One of the more prominent releases based on this technology was the Google Glass released in 2013 which had to, unfortunately, be retracted from the market not long after due to the torrent of public ridicule for privacy concerns.

Privacy concerns? Nonsense…
But what are the privacy concerns really for smart glasses? They just look like something from a science fiction spy movie that we can (finally) use in our daily lives. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Smart glasses are, like most wearables today, IoT (Internet of Things) devices and as we have pointed out previously those have a nasty habit of silently collecting and sharing or storing information about their surroundings and usage.

Think, for a moment, about how much information passes under your vision, most of which goes unnoticed but registers subconsciously. The ability for a computer lens to record alpha-numerical patterns such as key phrases, passwords and even account numbers operates at a micro fraction of a second. Now consider standing in the queue at your local grocer and the customer ahead of you takes out her credit card. If the card number should enter your field of vision the smart glasses could automatically record and store that information without you or anyone even knowing. Although this does not necessarily pose you as a threat, the data that is stored on centralised servers does.

How do they ‘connect’ the Dots?

GPS Tracking
It comes as no surprise, with the rise and improvement of location tracking systems such as GPS and other methodologies, that it becomes more and more ‘natural’ to integrate into our personal and professional lives.

Take a look back into the not-so-distant past, when drivers operating company vehicles had to keep a manual logbook of their respective trips each day. That has been replaced by satellite tracking units that can monitor everything from the times the ignition has been switched on/off to the speed, brakes, and curbing. It is no wonder that these systems have gained popularity in many professional fields due to the vast amounts of data that they can present office-bound employees with.

Employee Tracking
Looking into this more in-depth, we focus on South Africa and its last-mile delivery service providers or local couriers for short. Most, if not all, have some form of a satellite-based tracking device installed in their vehicles that is widely used for vehicle recovery in the event of a theft. These vehicles are often also fitted with forward-facing and cabin cameras that monitor the driver and assistant while providing a frontal view on the road which comes in very handy in the event of an accident to provide evidence for insurance claims.

But the lines can get somewhat blurred when you look at the contractual agreements between these drivers, the vehicles, and the service provider employing them. Most of these drivers servicing last-mile delivery systems are employed on a contract or sub-contract basis meaning that the vehicles belong to them and not the company that they work for. Meanwhile, the company has access to the location and visual data of these vehicles at all times, whether used for business or private use and at any time of the day. It is a major privacy concern and perilously balances the thin line between the implications of fair workplace monitoring — a topic that we will be covering in a future article.

Do regulations promote/prevent location data Tracking?

Turning the gaze towards Europe
If we take the case study in the previous section over to Europe, we see a different side of the coin. With the implementation of the General Data Protection Act (GDPR) and the Federal Data Protection Act (BDSG) back in 2019, the degree to which employers can use tracking data on their employees is greatly restricted. Taking a quote from a previous article (removed) by Anna-Lena Glander:
When using location tracking systems, companies must ensure that permission under data protection law exists for processing the location data of their employees or third parties. Otherwise, there is a risk of prosecution for the company due to breaches of data protection obligations.

Only in exceptional cases are employers allowed to intervene when it comes to location data on their employees outside of their respective work environments as stipulated in the acts (see Art. 6 (1) GDPR).

Implications on Privacy
This question was investigated in a now infamous study mentioned and quoted in numerous articles on the topic, by two researchers — Mirco Musolesi (University of Bologna, Italy) and Benjamin Baron (University College London, UK) where they looked at the data collected by the mobile application TrackingAdvisor. So to refrain from redundancy and simply re-quote the details (again), we went off of the beaten track and searched for alternative examples.

Solutions Tackling the Issue

Throughout the countless hours of research and sourcing for this three-part series, we have also looked for businesses who are actively building applications to combat the issue that we have discussed over the now three-week period — the implications of wireless communication & location tracking on privacy. In that search, we have come across one that stood out above the rest.

The PAD Protocol
We first learned about PAD Protocol early this year shortly after they had launched. Through that time, they have developed and built an impressive business model that holds a topic so dear to our hearts, at its core: privacy by design.

How it works, in a nutshell:
PAD Protocol has recruited and will continue to do so as the network grows, a handful of institutional players who can reliably contribute to the decentralisation of the network. These mostly constitute universities where students can base their studies on the network’s design and propose improvements as time goes by. The process is simple — an institution applies to become a trustee and once approved, they are provided with a Raspberry Pi (RPi4) on which the software is loaded. When validation requests are received, the trustees need to approve the transaction before it is processed. For a more in-depth explanation of how it works, give their white paper a read.

Of the three various products offered by PAD Protocol, we focused on one specifically for this article: The Sidekick App where users of the mobile application can share their location with trusted friends and allow Sidekick to let them know exactly which friend has accessed their location and when. The idea is to stay looked after, and know when you have been looked after without broadcasting your real-time location data to the entire world (in theory) on centralised servers.

Final Thoughts

Location tracking is so deeply engraved into our digital lifestyles that it is not something that we can run away from. What we can do, however, is to mitigate the amount of information that we involuntarily or even unconsciously share with others. It remains our responsibility to be alert and consider the implications of the technologies that we interact with ranging from mobile applications to wearable devices. A good rule of thumb is to always remember “if it’s free, you are the product.”