Imagine you are calmly browsing around duty free at Heathrow airport. You’ve checked in your bags, you’ve had a coffee, you’ve checked Facebook, you neither know nor care what time it is, because you know you’ve plenty of spare time, and now your loved one is texting you to wish you bon voyage.

Or… what's this?

It isn’t a loved one. It’s your airline telling you it knows exactly how far away you are from your gate and that you should start running - now.

Airline specialist SITA has been explaining at a conference in Brussels how the air transport industry could use technology to discover where someone is, based on their mobile phone. Airlines could use the technology to find out if a passenger is on time for his/her flight, if they are likely to show up, if they are in a congested area and whether or not they should be prompted to head to the gate.

This is obviously an excellent marketing opportunity - mobile advertising revenue is predicted to hit $14bn by 2012 - as phone settings can offer information on which languages the user speaks and what their preferences are.

And there are ways of finding out who is in the room with you and automatically accessing their contacts list. Then you could change your phone mode depending on what you want to share and who with.
It’s a bit scary, but no scarier than what we already have, according to Jim Peters, chief technology officer of SITA.

“There’s going to be spam, there are going to be viruses, there’s going to be people trying to get into your keylogger; expect them, they won’t go away,“ he said.

“We will see the same kind of issues in this environment that we’ve seen on the internet. But the underlying technology is there to handle it, and there will have to be careful handling.

“I don’t want the boogie man knowing where my kids are. But for our kids and the digitally-enabled generation, it’s not scary for them. They’re not held up by these barriers, it’s going to be about what’s socially acceptable behaviour and what’s not.”

Ignoring the security issues, and provided the technology remains in “safe” hands, I would be torn between convenience and wanting to protect my privacy. I will probably think it’s fine until the adverts start coming…

By Janie Davies