THE increasing sophistication of doping practices in sport has forced the anti-doping authorities to reassess how they monitor athletes.

For the past decade, the "Whereabouts" system has been in place. It requires athletes to inform the anti-doping authorities up to three months in advance where they will be for one hour each day of every day of the week. It is not a great system – mistakes have been made by athletes; relatively regularly, testers have turned up at the stipulated time on the stipulated day only to find that the athlete isn’t there. Training plans have been changed at the last minute, the athlete would say. They would pick up an injury and need an emergency physio appointment, for instance. The list of reasons for not being at their stated location was endless but, regardless, it counted as a missed test. Three missed tests and an athlete is banned. When the Whereabouts system was introduced, there was much dissention but eventually it was accepted simply because the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) couldn’t come up with anything better.

However, the countless doping scandals that have been uncovered in recent years have damaged the credibility of sport to such an extent that public trust has been eroded to almost zero. This crisis has forced the anti-doping authorities into a rethink. It is generally accepted that the dopers remain ahead of the testers so the testing procedures must be altered and improved if more cheating athletes are to be caught.

It is no easy feat to come up with a solution to the doping catastrophe that is engulfing sport at the moment, but the German Federal Ministry thinks it may have come up with an answer. It is funding a project called "Paradise" and one of its primary aims is to improve the usability of the testing procedure for athletes. This is an admirable aim; the current Whereabouts system is ridiculously hard to operate, not least because knowing where you will be in three months' time is nigh on impossible. Yes, an athlete can currently change their location up to one minute before their testing window begins but, still, it makes slip-ups very easy.

So the aim of Paradise is a good one. How it plans to improve the system in practical terms is less satisfactory. The Paradise project is considering providing athletes with a "wearable gadget that will determine an athlete's location and may thus reduce the time spent to keep the whereabouts information up to date.” So athletes will basically be given a GPS tag to wear which will allow doping control officers to locate them for testing.

That anti-doping needs to be improved is not in question, but at what point do we reach the line whereby athletes' privacy is being infringed on to such an extent that it is going too far? Athletes already divulge practically every shred of medical information about themselves on top of knowing that testers can turn up at their home at 6am or 11pm. These are accepted parts of being an athlete. But surely the point where they have to be tagged is a step too far.

When the original Whereabouts system was initially introduced, there were a number of athletes who were unhappy about their privacy being invaded to such an extent. Indeed, Rafa Nadal called the original system “intolerable harassment”, a group of British rowers wrote an open letter calling the system “unworkable” and 65 Belgian athletes filed a formal challenge to the rule in the Belgian high court, citing the European Convention on Human Rights. And Lolo Jones, the American sprint hurdler, expressed her frustration in 2009 when she said: “Maybe in the future they will find a tag they can put on us like dogs have.” She didn’t know how prescient a statement that was.

Sport must pay a price for the suspicion that now surrounds it and this means that athletes must put up with a level of intrusion that few other jobs require. The burden of proof seems now to have shifted onto the athlete to prove they are clean rather than the anti-doping testers to prove an individual is dirty. This is a responsibility that almost every athlete accepts without dissent, however inconvenient it may be.

But at some point, we must remember that athletes are people too and it seems wildly unfair to suggest they should wear an electronic tag in the way that criminals do just because they’re good at sport. And what is to suggest that those willing to cheat in the first place won't be able to tamper with the device to cheat the system? No system will prevent doping entirely. But surely WADA and others can come up with a better solution than tracking every move of its athletes.