It sounded too Orwellian ever to succeed. In 2000, Korean cellular carrier SK Telecom introduced a service called "find friends" that lets others follow your every move, using a signal beamed from your handset. At the time, many wondered whether anyone would consent to such tracking.
But five years — and countless terrorist attacks, earthquakes, and other calamities — later, the service is taking off. "I used to be worried when my boyfriend didn’t answer my calls," says Shim You Sun, a 25-year-old accountant who pays 11 cents each time she checks up on him. "Now I can rest assured that he is at work or busy attending a seminar."
She’s one of more than 4 million Koreans who have signed up for various services using technology that can determine a cellular subscriber’s location. One, costing $3 per month, will send a message with your coordinates to friends and family periodically while you’re traveling. Another will automatically dispatch a text message to friends who get within a block or so of each other as they move around town. Yet another, costing 29 cents a day, will send a message if a person isn’t at a specified place at a certain time and then allows the tracker to see the person’s movements over the previous five hours. And 20,000 parents pay $10 per month for alerts if their children stray from the route between school and home. The Korea Association of Information & Telecommunication reckons such services are growing by 74% annually, with revenues expected to triple in 2007, to $1.54 billion, from $500 million last year.
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