Greetings. Earlier this month, the disturbing news circulated of a man who shot his five children and himself after discovering his wife with another man -- reportedly through the use of GPS cell phone tracking. While details regarding the GPS aspects of the case haven't yet appeared, AT&T has now introduced a new service that may gladden the heart of spouse stalkers all over the country.

Called FamilyMap, the service allows the account owner to track the location of other cell phones in the account over the Internet or on their own cell phones. While this concept isn't particularly new, the manner of implementation that AT&T has chosen for this service is quite alarming.

Rather than following the conventional procedure of requiring confirmation from a cell phone that its user wishes to permit tracking, FamilyMap allows for the activation of tracking based solely at the discretion of the account owner. A tracked phone is supposed to receive a single text message informing its user that they will henceforth be tracked -- but if that message is ignored, missed, or never received at all, tracking will apparently still commence.

The tracked phone will not show any indications that its location is being monitored, except reportedly for the attempted sending of another text message to that phone -- but only once a month.

The abuse potentials of this situation are obvious. It is difficult to comprehend why AT&T would create a tracking service that doesn't require positive confirmation of the target for activation before initiating "silent" tracking for weeks.

AT&T is demonstrating exactly the wrong way to deploy a location-based mobile service. We can only hope that they realize their mistake and change FamilyMap policies -- before someone is hurt or killed after being unknowingly tracked by a spouse or someone else in a shared account situation.

Shame on you, AT&T.

--Lauren--