Cellphone tracking is really hitting the big time. I had to add a new scary_as_hell tag for tracking some recent stories on my del.icio.us page.

Dana Knight reports in the Chillicothe Gazette that parents are giving their teenagers cellphones with a GPS tracking system enabled. CAT Trax lets parents log in to the Internet to track their children's whereabouts.

"I can watch [my son's] path minute by minute and see if he deviates from the path," says [Wendy] Garcia, who lives in San Jacinto, Calif. "If he calls and says he's home, I can look on the map and see he isn't and say, 'Ah ha. I know you're lying.' "

The next release of the system will "allow parents to create zones, called geofencing. What this means is parents can program inclusion and exclusion zones, where they want their children to be and where they don't want them to be."

I can't think of a better way to help children build autonomy and responsibility. I shudder when I compare this to my childhood, where I'd head out the door on a summer morning, with the only requirement that I be home when the streetlights came on.

Ben Goldacre reports in The Guardian that you can use cellphone location services for stalking:

"This week, I noticed a glaring flaw in the mobile phone networks that allows you to stalk people, and find their location to within 200 yards, any time you want, without their permission. You don't have to be Einstein; there are websites all over the internet to do this."

"Here is how it works. You register on the site, pay a few quid, type in the phone number of the person you want to track, and then the system sends them a text message. All you need to do is surreptitiously get access to your target's mobile phone, without their knowledge, for just five minutes: long enough to receive that text message, reply with the word LOCATE, and delete two text messages that arrive immediately, warning them they are being tracked. You can stalk them for a couple of days, find out if they really are where they say they are, work out who they are with, perhaps find out if they're having an affair, then delete them off the system. They will never be any the wiser."

"I asked my girlfriend if I could, in principle, track her for a day, without telling her how: she agreed and I set the service up on her phone, in five minutes, while she was asleep. I have a map of her movements in front of me right now. It feels very wrong. And it required no technical knowledge, or 'hacking', whatsoever. That this is possible, and so easy, to my mind, is extremely sinister."

There are also services that don't bother with the pretense of notifying the person being tracked. For $200, Confidential Searches will give you the current location of a cellphone number.