Week 2 Newspaper Article

The article I choose was written by Manny Fernandez and taken from the New York Times Newspaper on Saturday August 29, 2009. The article title is “Building Department to Track Inspectors via Cell phone and GPS Technology”; as my title did last week it does this week as well, speaks for itself. Within the article it tells how the Building departments will start installing Global Positioning Technology in cell phones to see where their clients are throughout their work schedule. They say the new tracking system is taking place because of the Edward Marquette case; an inspector who was charged last year with faking a report that he inspected a tower crane on the East side of Manhattan in response to a complaint. He never visited the crane, the authorities said, and 11 days later, it toppled and killed seven people.

They say the new tracking system will cause no problems and it is just a simple, new innovative way to ensure inspectors reach their destinations and are held accountable for doing so. Not only will they be able to see who is where they are suppose to be but supervisors will be able to tell who is closest to an emergency if necessary. This is good because its less time the problem is not being fixed in other words the problem is only a problem for a matter of minutes maybe hours because of this technology.

So one would say what is next? Where do we go from here? Some workers are very concerned but if you think of it this way if you are doing your work, like you should be, there will/should be no problems. The other common question is many if not all workers carry their company cell phones with them at all time; would this be a violation of privacy laws? The building department claims they can set the computer to only monitor during set work hours. We will see how this turns out. Like everything else that is electronic items tend to malfunction.