In September, a European Union directive called E112 came into force that requires mobile phone networks to provide emergency services with whatever location information they have about where a mobile phone call was made. There is no question it might help the needy, but it also raises some interesting privacy issues. When a similar scheme was introduced in Britain for landlines a few years ago, response times to emergency calls improved dramatically, says Quentin Armitage, deputy director of technology for the London Ambulance Service. The aim is to make a similar improvement for cellphone emergency calls. While Europe is leading the way on cellphone positioning, other countries are not far behind. In the US a similar law will force network operators to track a phone's location to within 50 metres by 2005, and to make this data available to emergency services. Network operators have been quick to spot the business opportunities this offers. If they can locate a caller for the emergency services, why not for other purposes too? Now the first businesses to exploit this information are beginning to appear and they provide a glimpse of the kinds of services we can expect in future. In the UK, the network operator Vodafone leads the pack. As the only one of the nation's five major mobile network operators to have met the EU directive's September deadline, its customers can already use their phones to find the nearest ATM, cinema or a plumber through WAP (wireless application protocol), the stripped-down web service designed for mobile phones. Just tell your phone that you want a flower shop or a Chinese restaurant and it searches local telephone directories to find the nearest hit. Another service allows businesses to track their employees particularly useful in the courier industry, for example. And a London-based start-up called Zingo has begun exploiting the service to put callers in touch with the nearest available taxi. Parents can even sign up to see where their children are, or at least where they left their mobile phones. Similar services are becoming available in other countries. A Stockholm-based company called It's Alive has launched a game that lets people hunt each other using their phones. And in the US, the Houston-based start-up Findtheone.com plans to offer phone owners a dating service that will alert them when potential partners who have also signed up are nearby. Hmmm, I suppose you could always switch it off. Source: New Scientist.