Location Tracking to Call? Then vs. Now
Nowadays, people cannot avoid being tracked digitally. Data collection is inherent no matter what circumstance. People implicitly share information about themselves, both purposefully for valid purposes to own a bank account and implicitly when regularly browsing the internet. Location is one of the most hidden aspects people first try to privatize understandably, except during necessary situations like emergencies where responders may need contact information. But are there other legitimate reasons to track location other than ensuring one’s safety?
When ubiquitous computing emerged in the 1990s, engineers believed so. They thought that location can be used to assist other devices in optimally operating. The location recording systems imagined by the Olivetti Research Laboratory extended more than modern GPS systems of monitoring geographically where someone is. Olivetti instead delved into deeper location detection, specifically where someone was within a building, to enhance synchronous communication in the workforce.
In 1991, Olivetti created the Active Badge Location System in response to their prior Pandora Project that experimented with the possible improvements of digital telephony. If Sam called Carl, the Pandora system would direct the call to Carl’s office phone. But what if Carl was not in his office, and Sam’s call was an urgent issue? Olivetti’s Active Badge Location System solves this problem by providing Carl’s room location information, and the system can then direct the call to the phone of the room Carl is located at.
The system consisted of several master stations, active badges, and an application holding real-time data. Staff would wear active badges as they worked, and master stations were mounted in rooms. The master stations then detected the badges’ infrared signals to then record staff location data back to the application. The badges’ signals would trigger a unique signal every 15 seconds for a tenth of a second to continuously update the master stations with the correct location.
The application of the system listed the name, room, and the location status of employees. If it stated 100% for an employee, that meant that the employee is surely in the room specified. If the percentage is lower, the employee is moving around. Other statues noted if the badge has not been detected in a while, stating either the last day it was detected, the last location the badge was detected, or “AWAY”. Command prompts specific to finding information were available too.
Overall, the Active Badge Location System was significant to telephone receptionists’ productivity, allowing them to direct calls accurately with higher user satisfaction. Calls could be made no matter who the staff is looking to speak to, and further influenced today’s digital telephony in certain aspects and location-based services, as it served as one of the first inventions with location-awareness.
Could the system be adapted to today, given the capabilities it had during the 1990s? Not completely, though its core concepts have been irregularly implemented to modern telephony standards unlike how Olivetti may have expected. Compared to today’s standards of call routing, some of the Active Badge Location System’s characteristics and flaws have been addressed with Voice-over-IP telephony (VoIP), the main standard most businesses handle internal telephony. The most popular VoIP system provider, Cisco, shares a portion of the Active Badge Location System’s properties. Other VoIP providers will have different implementations of functionalities Cisco VoIP has; however, most VoIP companies share the same abilities as any other unified communications platform.
Cisco’s infrastructure is unique in how it includes limited internal location tracking. Cisco VoIP’s closest integration of location tracking similar to the Active Badge Location System is through the Cisco Emergency Responder (CER) architecture. CER is another addition to Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager (CUCM), allowing emergency calls to include contextual details of an emergency call taking place. For instance, an Emergency Response Location (ERL), callback number, and Automatic Location Information (ALI) would be provided to emergency responders to still assist someone when the caller cannot completely state information clearly to authorities.
The ERL and ALI may seem the same, though they represent different areas of a building depending on the emergency. The ERL is where the emergency call took place, and the ALI represents where the emergency is. A complaint from the Active Badge Location System noted that receptionists wanted the system to predict where someone was moving from and to a destination, if possible, to decide a better phone routing option if a person was not completely detected in one room. This could not be achieved knowing that badges would only emit signals once every 15 seconds, a slow rate that would miss the location of a person until they were at their destination. Although Cisco’s CER addition does not completely match the receptionists’ needs, CER at least proves that distinctions between locations can be identified through proper emergency response.
It would be a shock to the past telephone receptionists though that VoIP telephony has omitted the need to know people’s locations to still place calls with others. Voice networking took their jobs, the master stations, and allowed digital calls to pass through smartphones. If employees have the Cisco Jabber app installed in this instance, people can still place calls with others rather than relying on a physical business phone.
Smartphones have skipped the need for active badges, the physical devices of the system, and past logistics facilitating the system’s purposes. Location was a concern when the Active Badge Location System was made because digital telephony was not possible through cell phones during the time. Today, smartphones can handle analog and digital telephony, and as everyone carries their phone, location is not a concern anymore.
This does not mean that Cisco has completely rid of location detection for telephony processes though. Other than the CER architecture, CUCM still detects location within the scope of how a Jabber user is connected to their company’s internal phone network. Recognition can be identified through staff using Jabber, such as when they open the app in a place they have not before. Users could assign their location themselves if they wished to. CUCM administrators can further point down where a user is connected, and thus their location if they enable the Wireless Location Monitoring Service after digging through network connection information. Thus, there are further layers to figuring out one’s location concerning their phone with modern-day VoIP systems contrasting with the Active Badge Location System.
Throughout time, people were concerned about who would know where they are when the Active Badge Location System was used. Access to this data was restricted to the system except for telephony workers for Olivetti’s creation. Today, exact location information cannot be stated simply and is instead derived from gathering network routing information of a user, which would require highly technical people to identify.
Other improvement requests suggested by system users have been delivered by VoIP networking, and today’s advancements have mostly placed the Active Badge Location System as a discontinuous technology. Thankfully through continuous efforts, overdependence on location-awareness has become absent from the main operations of calling. Even though it seems that we are constantly being tracked geographically, the assurance that digital telephony at least deviated from it, reminding users that their data is being respected and has only been acknowledged in sensible contexts. In spite that we are not calling like how the Active Badge Location System attempted, we all can continue communicating in real-time with minimal intrusion of privacy, a definite improvement from the original ideas Olivetti had in mind.
