Husbands who are not where they are supposed to be could soon be in danger of being “sniffed” out by a mobile phone service that gives suspicious partners an electronic map showing the location of their spouse.

The Social Network Integrated Friend Finder (Sniff) is a new application, accessed via Facebook or mobile phone, which could bring an end to frantic “Where r u?” text messages.

The service, popular in Scandinavia, promises to provide users with a detailed map of their friends’ locations, any time and anywhere. However, there are fears that Sniff could be abused by employers to remove the last vestiges of privacy from staff.

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Useful Networks, the American company behind Sniff, promised that only consumers who gave their permission could be electronically tracked by the service, which operates across all mobile carriers. Users can specify who can and can not sniff them, or whether they are open to be sniffed by anyone on the network. The company plans to charge users about 75p for each location “sniff”, with the results for mobile customers sent by return text. It will be the first Facebook application to apply premium charges to customers’ mobile bills. The heaviest users in Sweden are wireless-connected members of the social networking site, who have integrated the application into their personal profile page.

“Sniffing” works through similar technology used by the police to track down suspected terrorists or missing children via their mobile phones. The phone sends a signal to nearby base stations. Positioning software performs a triangulation calculation on the information from the base stations and converts it into a geographical location.

Brian Levin, chief executive officer of Useful Networks, told The Times: “Privacy is paramount and sniffing should only be used by people you can trust. It is a fun way to solve the proven most popular text message, ‘Where r u?’”

Full article here.