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Radio 4,29 Nov 2019,14 mins

Available for over a year

What would happen if GPS (the Global Positioning System) stopped working? From emergency services to ride-sharing apps to just-in-time supermarket logistics networks, the ability to navigate using GPS is baked into the economy. And that’s just the start. GPS is not so much a location service as a time service. Power grids, stock markets and cloud computing all depend on the ability to agree on the exact time. No wonder GPS is sometimes called the “invisible utility�. But Tim Harford thinks that perhaps what we should really fear is not so much GPS signals going down, as being spoofed in ways we fail to notice. Producer: Ben Crighton Editor: Richard Vadon

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