Profiling and Critiquing the Active Badge
When handling a large corporation or a business within a building, it is very difficult to figure out the location of all the employees. For example, doctors and nurses are always needed as soon as possible during emergencies and it can be challenging to pinpoint their location during a crisis. The receptionist can only do so much to track down employees by using a telephone or a speaker to notify said employee but knowing their location within the building always makes everyone’s lives much easier. The Active Badge was introduced to efficiently pinpoint the location of staff within a working environment.
History
Italian computer manufacturer Olivetti introduced the Active Badge in 1990. The Active Badge is an early wearable ubicomp system that was designed to be worn around the neck for corporate employees. The Active Badge was limited to buildings that were specifically wired so that whenever an Active Badge enters a room, the central database will update with the employee’s location. According to an article at AT&T Laboratories, the Active Badge is “worn by personnel transmits a unique infra-red signal every 10 seconds. Each office within a building is equipped with one or more networked sensors which detect these transmissions.” (AT&T). With this information, the location of the employees will be known every 10 seconds. Approximately 1500 badges and 2000 sensors were made for multiple European universities.
Critiquing the Active Badge
When thinking about some issues about the Active Badge, one can bring up how privacy could be an issue. For example, an employer could use the system to analyze a certain employee’s movement throughout the building. Being an employee, you wouldn’t want your location to be checked up on all the time as it would be rather uncomfortable and give you a sense of someone constantly watching over your shoulders. Employees who were told to wear Active Badges should be informed where the data was going and who would have access to seeing their location. This would bridge the trust gap between employees and employers which would be needed if private employee data was being tracked at all times in a specific building.
A research article based on figuring out whether or not students are aware of data privacy and institutional data practices. It was clear to the researchers that students did not have much knowledge about data privacy and went on to talk about how consent was an important factor for them. If institutions were to collect data, giving some form of consent is necessary. They stated, “[higher education institutions] don’t really give information to students [about] how they are using the student data.” Without this information, as another student said, they have no idea “how deep [LA] goes” and “how far [institutions] will take it…. I just feel like we’re being tracked at all times.”( Jones, K., et al. (2020)). Going back to data practices from when Active Badges were used, it would be very important to give an explanation as to what the data is being used for and where it is going.
The Fall of the Active Badge
The Active Badge was designed to pinpoint user locations within a building to be able to contact employees with ease. By having a system that notifies certain employees which room someone is in, it seemed very useful and got rid of wasted time trying to look for someone. Although the Active Badge seemed very effective for corporations and efficiency in the workspace, it proved rather useless as soon as mobile phones became popular. Because mobile phones were so easy to use and easy to communicate with each other, the Active Badge had become outdated.
The Evolution of the Active Badge
Thinking about the Active Badge and its usefulness, one system that has similar functionalities to the Active Badge would be the Find My app. Apple products have an app built-in it which allows someone to be able to track that specific product. The app used is “Find My” and when logged in using the Apple ID, the user can find their device when it was last used. The different devices that can be tracked are the iPhone, Apple Watch, AirTag, and Airpods.
The key difference between the Active Badge and the Apple Find My network is that the Active Badge is limited to the specific building with its designated transmitters whereas the Find My network calculates a GPS location anywhere with no boundaries. Another difference is that the Active Badge has labelled transmitters within a building so that the system is notified which specific room an employee is in whereas the Find My network relies on pinpointing a decentralized location of the device. The Apple devices won’t be able to notify you what room it is located in but has a much longer range than the Active Badge.
Although the uses of these two systems are different, it is apparent that the Find My network evolved from the Active Badge. I think this was a great way to technology to evolve because the likelihood of threats increases as technology advances. To battle some privacy threats, Apple put in a security feature which only allows the owner of the device to track their product through their Apple ID and password.
Thinking into the future, Apple products have already started selling Air Tags which allow any object to be tracked as long as the Air Tag is attached to the product. For example, one can attach the Air Tag to their keys or wallet so that there will always be a GPS location for these items. Going from just tracking employees within a specially wired building to tracking everything and anything proves that one technological idea can be used for multiple aspects in life.
“Active Badge.” Active Badge — Cyborg Anthropology, http://cyborganthropology.com/Active_Badge.
“The Active Badge System.” ATT Labs, http://cam-orl.co.uk/ab.html.
Jones, K., et al. (2020). “We’re being tracked at all times”: Student perspectives of their privacy in relation to learning analytics in higher education. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 71(9), 1044–1059.
