Sprint debuts loopt friend-mapping service

General

"Where you at, dawg?" Now, the answer doesn’t require a vocal response. In a new debut, Sprint is rolling out a service called loopt, a GPS-based location tracker, that allows friends and family to share their location and transmit proximity-based messages a la Helio’s Buddy Beacon. Basically, the people in your network will show up on your map, and you even have the option to get alerts when they’re in they’re in ya ’hood. The flip-side, of course, is that everyone else in your network can see if you’re up to no good where you are, as well. Perhaps the new question should be "Big Brother, where art thou?"

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4 Comments
  • artie

    There is such a freedom in living a life of not looking over your shoulder to see who is watching you. eg: speeders always looking to see where the police are. If you are not doing any thing you should not be doing, you have nothing to hide. With freedom comes responsibility. I can see a lot of good coming from this. Not everything has to be negative. Let us turn off the “boob tube” for a while and live.

  • backbeat

    Living under the guise of someone else’s definition of ‘freedom’, with monitors a-twitter is not freedom, nor is it American. It is, indeed, Orwellian.

    Fortunately, this is a purely optional feature. Otherwise, the DHS would also have this data, per Sprint’s timely reporting.

  • RussDee

    What does “turning off the boob tube and living” have anything to do with a gps system that tells people where you are at all times? While cool in concept, I could see this being used for equally uncool purposes. Imagine if your kid gave access to their gps to some child predator on their myspace friends list. Would you want them knowing where your kid is at all times?

  • zulu

    backbeat: The DHS doesn’t really need this. They’ve been listening in on our cellular conversations for quite some time.

    I can definitely see instances where this would be great; as well as those in which it could be used maliciously. As the old saying goes, “GPS doesn’t infringe upon the individual. [i]Idiots[i] with GPS do.”

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