Smart card maker Sagem Orga has embarked on a strategic partnership with BlueSky Positioning to integrate assisted-GPS (A-GPS) positioning technology on SIM cards for mobile phones. The company suggested that by providing GPS capability on a SIM card, it would provide a relatively inexpensive means of opening up the market for location-based services to a wider market. Sagem Orga and BlueSky Positioning’s new approach incorporates a GPS receiver and a proprietary antenna into the SIM card, enabling mobile operators to deploy both legally mandated and commercial applications quickly and cost-effectively for all mobile handsets, with no need for software or hardware changes. To make localization even more accurate and user friendly, the A-GPS SIM uses assisted GPS data.

Depending on the additional cost, we might be seeing this as a standard feature in SIM cards in the future, although for those that extremely paranoid, this might be a scary thing, since you can always be tracked. We can imagine that the mobile network operators could also use this to try to send targeted SMS advertising to its customers, which could become a new blight of spam in the future.

Via