New York City's taxi drivers are threatening to strike next month, angry over new rules requiring cabs to have a global positioning system installed beginning Oct. 1. The GPS is part of a package including a touch screen that lets passengers pay by credit card, see their location on a map and the path they've traveled, look up information and get news and weather information. (I tested it over the weekend as a passenger and frankly it needs work — I couldn't get baseball scores, and working the touch screen is difficult amid the whiplash of acceleration. But our location was accurate, though about half a block behind our actual position when traffic was moving.)

The cabbies are worried about the expense of installing and maintaining the system, annoyed about paying transaction fees on credit cards and debit cards, and fear the system will be used to track them or report their earnings to the Internal Revenue Service. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance, an advocacy group, has compared the system to ankle bracelets worn by prisoners restricted to their homes.

Setting aside that pungent image, the Taxi and Limousine Commission says such fears are overblown, telling drivers that it's medallion owners who'll pay the installation and maintenance costs, and that taking cards leads to more revenue. The TLC says that drivers won't be tracked and their information won't be reported to the IRS. Rather, GPS will be used as a source of aggregate information (for example, how many cabs are available at certain intersections at rush hour); replace today's handwritten "trip sheets" listing time, location, destination, fare and the like; and help passengers retrieve lost items. (If that sounds like a small thing, the TLC says more than 54% of the calls it received in 2005 were about lost items.) Moreover, the enhancements were agreed to as part of a 2004 fare increase, the TLC says.

Many of the specifics of this quarrel concern drivers and their relationship with their employers (most New York City cabbies lease their cab from private companies) and the TLC, which licenses medallions and regulates drivers. But specifics aside, the drivers' worries are ones that plenty of us can sympathize with. Increasingly, it seems, where we go and what we do leaves a trace. Our Internet-service provider can keep tabs on our Web searches; our supermarket studies our buying habits; our car contains an event recorder that an insurance company might dig into; our local government might have put our Social Security number and other personal information online; and anyone who can spell our name can snoop into our affairs with a Google search. And at work we know our email can be read and our Internet activities monitored.

Now, add in the uneasy feeling we sometimes have that email and cellphones don't serve us so much as they make us our servants. Always being reachable has created expectations — it's harder and harder to disengage from work, family and friends, as those pecking at their Blackberrys in the evenings or on vacation can attest. Of course we rebel at the prospect of having our location known, too — it can feel like that's the one bit of information we still get to keep to ourselves. (And even then, it may not be as big a secret as we think. A few years ago, a colleague who hated the picture on her ID told our security desk she'd lost her ID and needed a new one. She slunk off after an amused security guard looked at his monitor and recited the times and places her ID had been used in the last couple of hours.)

I've got bad news for taxi drivers and all the rest of us who worry about being tracked — within a decade or so, most of the devices we carry will be location-aware. Any number of location-based services will be in widespread use. And our friends, family and colleagues will increasingly know where we are — and perhaps expect to know it.

How will this happen? It'll be a combination of more and more such services being used, an emerging consensus about when it's proper to use GPS tracking, generational changes, and social pressure — a familiar digital-age combination.

Last summer I looked at the possibilities of location-based services, which work by combining where you are and what direction you're facing to "know" what you're looking at. The fictional model is the VL glasses from William Gibson's 1994 novel "Virtual Light," which let the wearer survey the world around them and call up information about whatever catches his or her eye. Reality's catching up with fiction here — on a recent beach trip, friends and I used a Celestron Skyscout to tell us what stars we were looking at, and knowing how the device worked didn't make it feel any less like magic. GPS-capable cellphones will soon lead us around cities; GPS-capable binoculars could be invaluable for sporting events, tours of historic sites, and the like. Last fall, I looked at another wrinkle of GPS. Loopt's "buddy-tracking" service lets you see a map showing the location of friends using the service — a social-networking twist on location-based services that relies on your phone not just knowing your location, but also transmitting it.

As more such services are deployed, we'll work out the rules of the road for when it's proper to use knowledge of our location. That process is already under way — laws in several states limit rental-car companies' use of GPS to enforce contract rules, following fury over customers being charged for speeding or violating rental agreements by taking cars out-of-state. And policies will emerge for workers in many walks of corporate life governing how often their locations are known and what, if anything, is done with this information. (I suspect cabbies will indeed be tracked, as many truckers are today — though the tracking will be done by their employers through lease agreements, not by city agencies through laws.)

Two other forces driving adoption of location-based services will be more subtle. Buddy-tracking may creep out thirtysomethings, but it seems natural to those who came along a decade or so later — they're used to using the likes of instant messaging and Twitter to broadcast what they're up to. That generational difference will drive a change in acceptance and interest in such services. And sooner or later, location-broadcasting services will go from accepted to expected. Answering machines and cellphones began as curiosities and became necessities. Today some people are annoyed if they can't reach you to at least leave a message — before too many tomorrows go by, they may feel that same way if they can't look at a map and know where you are.

And of course a little marketing always helps — Loopt's buddy-tracking has been wisely rechristened. It's now called friend-finding.

In 10 years or so, many devices we carry around with us may be able to track us by location virtually all the time. Are the taxi drivers on to something? Should we be concerned, as they are, about our whereabouts being so easily known? Or will we come to accept being findable, just as we've come to accept being reachable?

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