Picture the scene. You are supposed to be attending a sales conference in Crewe when you are woken from your slumbers by the ring tone from your company- issue mobile phone.
"I'm there now," you lie to your boss from the comfort of your hotel bed, safe in the knowledge that she will never know otherwise.
But, alas, your mobile phone uses a new technology which means your boss can pinpoint your exact location. You are soon collecting your cards and handing back the phone.
It is the stuff of slackers' nightmares. But "location-based track-ing" -- to use the mobile phone industry's terminology -- is about to become reality.
Mobile-phone networks will soon be able to pinpoint the precise location of a handset owner to within 10m or less. From the middle of next year many phones will carry Global Satellite Positioning chips, while another new technology, known as "Triangulation," can pinpoint a mobile-phone user's whereabouts by bouncing signals off three phone masts to establish an exact set of coordinates.
The concept has already been warmly embraced by a number of firms.
"It's popular with fleet and logistics firms who want to know where their lorries [trucks] are," said Julie Ramage of mobile-phone consultancy Analysys.
But the move has sparked huge controversy among civil liberty groups who fear that mobile-phone companies will be able to play Big Brother.
"It's a very worrying development. The scope for the misuse of this technology is enormous," said Barry Hugill, spokesman for the British civil liberties group Liberty.
At the heart of the issue is who should be allowed to track a mobile phone.
"If you have a mobile phone, your network operator must know where you are in order to provide a service. The issue is whether they make that information available to third parties," Ramage said. "That information cannot just be used by anybody. People have to sign up to have the information shared."
Some experts are worried that firms might make it a condition of an employee's job specification that they give their consent for their phone to be tracked.
"It's a complex area," Hugill said. "If your company issues you with a mobile phone, providing they tell you it can track you it's probably within the law. If your company does it covertly, then our view is that this would be illegal."
And not everyone is convinced that this "opt-in" system is foolproof. There have been suggestions that the software has already been hacked into by university students in Scotland who then tracked mobile-phone users across the UK.
Hugill said: "We all know that information gets passed on and ends up in the wrong hands."
There is further concern that mobile-phone users may respond to spam messages sent to their handsets without really knowing what they are signing up to. Children's charities have also expressed alarm that pedophiles might be able to exploit such a system.
Some pro-privacy campaigners go as far as to argue that the technology is part of a wider, more sinister trend to surveillance.
Simon Davies, director of campaign group Privacy International, said that a recent change in the law has meant mobile-phone networks must store a user's data for a year in case the police or the security services need to access it.
"There is a trend in Britain towards absolute identification, to a system of perfect tracking which eliminates the anonymity of movement," he said.
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