How come we can’t see on our cell phone where the calling party is? Privacy? I doubt it - it would be easy to add a convention that pressing a certain button passes on your current location. GPS needed? Not at all - by just using relative signal strengths and simple triangulation, any phone can easily “know” where it is.

Could it be that phone companies don’t want to draw attention to the fact that they are collecting obscene amounts of (SIM-ID, location, time) data? How come that topic never makes it to the headlines, other than when an alpinist gets saved because their cell phone was sending out its beacon signal? Does Google know when there is a flu outbreak? You bet. Does the phone company know when there is a traffic jam? You bet. Are there services we could be having cheaply or for free which aren’t being offered because there are other interests than the customer’s at stake? You bet. Are there things going on with all this data which we would object to if only we knew about them? You bet.

I’ll stop here. I’ll spare you a rant on the amounts of information obtained from all those satellites around our little planet :)