Global Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite-based navigation system originally developed by the U.S. Department of Defense for military purposes. It works in any weather, anywhere in the world.

This technology is emerging as an important tool in an organization’s security arsenal. Tracking devices use data from GPS satellites to determine the location of a person or vehicle, as well as their speed and direction of travel.

Vince Poloniato sees huge potential for GPS, so he started up Solutions Into Motion, a Canadian company based in Ancaster, Ont., that develops monitoring tools with cell phones, GPS and the Web. The company’s Trackem product — which can be used on a handset, BlackBerry or device installed in a vehicle — can track a vehicle’s location and speed, and sends out an alert when the vehicle is breaking speed limits or is in unapproved areas.

“It reaches out and constantly grabs my coordinates and puts a date-time stamp on that,” says Poloniato, president of Solutions Into Motion.

There are some privacy concerns over the use of tracking technology, but the benefits could outweigh these concerns. It’s expected that all cellphones and vehicles will come equipped with GPS, helping to locate missing people and stolen vehicles. It could even relegate the high-speed police chase to the realm of Hollywood movies, and we may start to see GPS embedded in clothing, watches and other personal items. “You’re going to see everything from fobs to jackets that have GPS in them,” says Poloniato.

Eventually, the application won’t reside on the device, he said, but on a server-based platform. Known as AGPS, or Assisted GPS, this allows a device to use cellular coverage as an immediate location method.

Cellphones with embedded GPS engines are being developed that would allow for wireless location-based services — and would be particularly useful in urban areas where users are under cover or even indoors. AGPS is faster than GPS, but dependent on cellular coverage.

“Then we’re really going to see a plethora of interesting technologies,” says Poloniato. One possible scenario is a digestible “fob” or security token. An oil worker travelling to the Middle East or Africa, for example, may have concerns about being kidnapped. That person may, in the not-so-distant future, be able to swallow a digestible fob so his or her whereabouts could be tracked — making it easy to pinpoint kidnappers.

Sound like science fiction? “It’s not really that far out there,” says Poloniato. “As soon as we become less dependent on the device itself to do all the work and use all the battery power, we’re really going to see a massive migration.” Trackem uses both interfaces, so if the GPS signal is lost, a cell tower can provide a location estimate.

Police are already using the technology. But while it’s great to have GPS on board, says Poloniato, it’s even better to have it in hand, should there be a foot pursuit and an officer is several blocks away from the vehicle. “The police force, they want this, but now they also want to be able to have imaging with camera phones,” he says, “and that’s coming.”

He’s investigating a technology called GeoSnapper, where a user snaps a photo and gets real-time information on where he or she is through photo identification.

But having the ability to track employees is not only for oil workers in Nigeria. Alberta is the first province to pass work-alone legislation, due to the fact it has such a highly mobile workforce in industries such as mining, oil and gas. Under provincial legislation, employers are now responsible for checking in with their mobile workers at least every two hours — and GPS could be an easy way to do that.

Employers can also use GPS to track vehicles or other assets. “We sell a lot to construction people,” says Gilbert Walz, co-owner of Security Concepts, which manufactures WorldTracker GPS tracking devices. “A lot of contractors buy them and put the trackers on appliances at construction sites.”

The devices themselves are tiny and can be easily concealed, he added. For example, if a device is installed in a vehicle and that vehicle moves when it’s not supposed to, the device will send a text message to the owner or call up to five phones. The owner can then use the Internet to track the vehicle or get the coordinates over his cellphone.

The owner can also put a “geo-fence” around a particular area, such as a building or parking lot. If a person or vehicle goes outside of that geo-fence, the device sends an alert to the owner.

One of Poloniato’s customers, for example, owns a fleet of trucks and set a geo-fence around his facility. Soon afterward, he received an alert in the middle of the night that one of his trucks had crossed the geo-fence. He immediately called the police. When the police tracked down the vehicle, it was discovered that an employee had been secretly making deliveries on the side, one night a week, for years — possibly as long as 10 years.
In another case, a transportation company was penalized $400 for allegedly failing to meet a crane company at an appointed drop site. However, the company was able to use GPS technology to prove they were, in fact, there.

“People can see where their assets are now,” says Walz. “They can also see where they were historically speaking, [because] they can log data.” The WorldTracker SMS is capable of recording data every two minutes, while the new version will update data every 15 seconds. “Police like that, investigators like that, people who have expensive products like that,” he says. “Two minutes can be a lot of time.”

Tom Leung, owner of A-Plus Gardening Supplies in Vancouver, has just started selling GPS tracking devices alongside everything from furniture to toilet paper because he’s seeing so much interest in the technology.
Skiers go missing every year at B.C.’s ski resorts, he says. “If they have a unit like this on them, instead of hundreds of people trying to search for that missing person, all you have to do is go on the computer and locate them right away and you save a life.” The device has a button that, when pressed, will send out an alert that you’re in trouble — and send out your coordinates to within 50 feet.

In one incident this summer, a high-speed police chase in Vancouver resulted in the death of a pedestrian.

With GPS tracking, the police could let the vehicle go and continue tracking it, says Leung, and catch the perpetrators after they stop. And this could eliminate dangerous high-speed police chases.

The benefits are numerous, from monitoring hazardous materials to keeping track of sexual offenders. The applications are only limited by the imagination — and Canada’s privacy legislation.

Vawn Himmelsbach is a Toronto-based freelance writer.