Image by Sir Mervs via Flickr
The issue of locational privacy has been percolating in technology policy and civil liberties circle for quite some time. But with fast-growing mobile application platforms, it seems to be reaching some sort of saturation point. From a technical standpoint, for your mobile phone to work, it has to know where it is in the world. And most people carry their mobile phones with them, so any application that knows where your phone is knows where you are.
Newsweek recently ran a story about the FBI using cell phone location data to track people without a warrant. It's pretty disturbing.
This capability to trace ever more precise cell-phone locations has been spurred by a Federal Communications Commission rule designed to help police and other emergency officers during 911 calls. But the FBI and other law-enforcement outfits have been obtaining more and more records of cell-phone locations—without notifying the targets or getting judicial warrants establishing "probable cause," according to law-enforcement officials, court records, and telecommunication executives.More innocuously, some companies, like Four Square, are making a game out of location data.
[...] A potentially more sinister request came from some Michigan cops who, purportedly concerned about a possible "riot," pressed another telecom for information on all the cell phones that were congregating in an area where a labor-union protest was expected. "We haven't even begun to scratch the surface of abuse on this," says Gidari.
[...] That was precisely what Smith and his fellow magistrates were worried about when they started refusing requests for cell-phone tracking data. (Smith balked only at requests for real-time information, while other magistrates have also objected to requests for historical data on cell-phone locations.) The grounds for such requests, says Smith, were often flimsy [...]
You send out alerts about where you are in real-time:
And some companies, like RunKeeper, are using location data to fill a useful niche: how far did I run at what speed? RunKeeper ran into an interesting issue (I'm inferring) when it started making map data available to its users and then publishing that data publicly if you as a user chose to make your run data public. While I might not mind the whole Internet knowing how far and how fast I went (I'm very slow, so I don't actually make this data available; too humiliating), I definitely don't want the Internet to know where I run so very specifically. So RunKeeper did the sensible thing and separated the map data from the other data and now you have a choice as to whether to publish map data or not. I still want them to make it so that I can be only semi-public about my data --- that is, so that my 'friends' on the RunKeeper site (or "Street Team") as they refer to them, can see my data but no one else.
Those are just two examples; there are countless others. Personally, I tend to be more squirrelly about location data than some other things. I think there's only negligible risk, statistically speaking, associated with posting snapshots of one's children on the Internet. But I do think there's at least a bit of risk announcing, for example, that your whole family's on vacation for a week. Posting such information announces: "my house is empty." (And in fact, a whole website has recently sprung up called "Please Rob Me" that purports to aggregate the public status updates of people who indicate they're away from their house. Isn't that funny? Yuk yuk. Sigh.) But, over the years, I've tended not to talk a lot about joint trips that my spouse and I take on my blog until after they've happened--at least not with specific dates. I might allude to vague upcoming trip possibilities. We haven't taken a vacation in ages, though, and have a family trip coming up, and it's going to be very hard for me not to reveal that by talking about where we are and what we're up to as we travel.
On the other hand, Andy Baio at waxy.org dug up a few quotes regarding past technologies and other kinds of information revelation (like listing weddings and funerals in newspapers) to suggest that fears about location revelation 1) are old news and 2) tend not to be borne out. My hunch is that the specificity, granularity, and real-time nature of the location data that can be revealed to not just the people who read your local paper, but to the globe, make today's challenges a bit different. But time will tell.
Now, who wants to be on my Street Team at RunKeeper?
People use foursquare to "check-in", which is a way of telling us your whereabouts. When you check-in someplace, we'll tell your friends where they can find you and recommend places to go & things to do nearby.If you visit a place more than anyone else, you can become mayor! For example, you can be the mayor of your local Starbuck's. Good times. I guess.
And some companies, like RunKeeper, are using location data to fill a useful niche: how far did I run at what speed? RunKeeper ran into an interesting issue (I'm inferring) when it started making map data available to its users and then publishing that data publicly if you as a user chose to make your run data public. While I might not mind the whole Internet knowing how far and how fast I went (I'm very slow, so I don't actually make this data available; too humiliating), I definitely don't want the Internet to know where I run so very specifically. So RunKeeper did the sensible thing and separated the map data from the other data and now you have a choice as to whether to publish map data or not. I still want them to make it so that I can be only semi-public about my data --- that is, so that my 'friends' on the RunKeeper site (or "Street Team") as they refer to them, can see my data but no one else.
Those are just two examples; there are countless others. Personally, I tend to be more squirrelly about location data than some other things. I think there's only negligible risk, statistically speaking, associated with posting snapshots of one's children on the Internet. But I do think there's at least a bit of risk announcing, for example, that your whole family's on vacation for a week. Posting such information announces: "my house is empty." (And in fact, a whole website has recently sprung up called "Please Rob Me" that purports to aggregate the public status updates of people who indicate they're away from their house. Isn't that funny? Yuk yuk. Sigh.) But, over the years, I've tended not to talk a lot about joint trips that my spouse and I take on my blog until after they've happened--at least not with specific dates. I might allude to vague upcoming trip possibilities. We haven't taken a vacation in ages, though, and have a family trip coming up, and it's going to be very hard for me not to reveal that by talking about where we are and what we're up to as we travel.
On the other hand, Andy Baio at waxy.org dug up a few quotes regarding past technologies and other kinds of information revelation (like listing weddings and funerals in newspapers) to suggest that fears about location revelation 1) are old news and 2) tend not to be borne out. My hunch is that the specificity, granularity, and real-time nature of the location data that can be revealed to not just the people who read your local paper, but to the globe, make today's challenges a bit different. But time will tell.
Now, who wants to be on my Street Team at RunKeeper?
Me!
Posted by: Katxena | Monday, March 01, 2010 at 06:05 PM