Where am I?

Happily I don't often lose my mobile phone but, should I do so, I can now be reassured that at least IT knows where it is - all the time, and will tell me where, should I happen to be with it. Not sure if this is a feature of the phone or of the service providers - it does not seem to work in the UK but works fine across several different service providers in at least two countries in Southern Africa. Passing through Johannesburg Airport I gave it a thorough test and found it can correctly identify different parts of the airport - Departure Lounge, Airport Offices etc. and only seems to falter when it comes to different floors: the smoking lounge was identified as Departures though it's on the floor above and the Ladies Toilets as Airport Offices - apparently for the same reason. As far as I can tell its level of accuracy goes as close as a few hundered metres in some instances.

Meanwhile, as I am being astounded by the latent GPS qualities of my phone Tony is not only being blown away by the ability of other phones to recognise music from just a few bars of a tune, but also being scared by the power of search in general and audio/speech search in particular. He also records how there is now software to recognise your friends faces, and thus their pictures, from within your photo albums. I am starting to think about something I read a while ago - that each of us is captured on CCTV at least a dozen times a day

Now even I am feeling a little uneasy. Not about what may be held and used in evidence against me - I've long assumed that as a part of everyday life - but about the fact that far from only being accessible to the big boys like security and law enforcement agencies, the technology for watching the minutiae of my daily life is just as accessible to my granny, or the man at the grocery store, or - whoever.