It’s Time to Stop LAMB (Location Based SPAM) Before It Even Exists

Posted on 6th February 2010 by Gary

We all suffer from SPAM, the unwanted and unsolicited commercial bulk emails that are the reason we have Junk Mail filters and folders in our email clients and servers. A quick glance at the Junk folder for my personal email account shows over 300 of these since the beginning of February alone.

If you use some form of instant messenger, be it MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ, AOL or any of the others on the market, you’ve probably come across SPIM, Instant Messaging SPAM. Then there’s also mobile phone SPAM via text messages, comment SPAM, the list goes on and on.
We’re poised to start seeing a new form of SPAM raise its ugly head. Let’s call it LAMB for now, Location Based Advertising SPAM.
“If you build your application with features based on a user’s location, make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.“
This is a good first step in locking down potential abuses of a technology before it has a chance to get out of control. The reason we have SPAM and all the other variants in the first place is that the underlying technologies were designed in an open manner with no control mechanisms in place to thwart unsolicited and unwanted messages and content. But we need to go further than this.

The first time you use a location aware app on an iPhone, it asks your permission in nice, unthreatening language; it “would like to use your current location“. What this actually means is that it wants to use, and continue to use, your precise location to the finest level of granularity that the A-GPS system on the phone is able to deliver at the time it’s being requested.
There’s no way of halting this process temporarily, of being your own source of truth for your location (AKA lying about your location) or of controlling this on a per application basis. You can only reset asking this permission for all apps and for the entire phone via the Settings app. Although some well behaved apps such as TweetDeck do allow you to disable use of location information altogether as as well as on a per Tweet basis.

What we really need is to see is a way to set location granularity, including no location information at all, on a per app basis in much the same way as Fire Eagle currently does. And for all apps on all location aware platforms, not just Apple’s and the iPhone’s.

Some may argue that requiring such a degree of choice and intervention by the user may raise the barrier to entry to such a degree that an app doesn’t reach such a large audience. It’s a valid argument but as part of the location industry, I believe that we need to find the middle ground between irking the user once per app and letting LAMB loose on the world which has the possibility of irking the user multiple times per hour.
Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

Another Piece Of Bloggage By Gary

Self professed "geek with a life", geo-blogger, geo-talker and geo-tweeter, Gary works in London and Berlin as Director of the Places Registry for Nokia; he's a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, the chair of w3gconf and sits on the W3C POI Working Group and the UK Location User Group. A contributor to the Mapstraction mapping API, Gary speaks and presents at a wide range of conferences and events including Where 2.0, State of the Map, AGI GeoCommunity, Geo-Loco, Social-Loco, GeoMob, the BCS GeoSpatial SG and LocBiz. Writing as regularly as possible on location, place, maps and other facets of geography, Gary blogs at www.vicchi.org and tweets as @vicchi.

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3 Responses to It’s Time to Stop LAMB (Location Based SPAM) Before It Even Exists

  1. James C says:
    February 6, 2010 at 8:49 PM

    Gary
    Don’t disagree at all (and I should be paying more attention to AlexsK on #bbcrevolution) but I doubt I’m alone in suspecting that LAMB is the holy grail of a wide range of marketeers and self styled entrepreneurs. The Apple declaration, and the interpretation of it as meaning its OK to do context sensitive LAMB, are by no means a marker in the sand but appear more a guideline as to how to app developers can monetise their apps and, unless I am missing something (and I maybe as my iphone is only 24 hours out of the box), with no opt-in requirement as to what the apps then try and ‘spam’ (sorry, appeal to) the user with, this avenue is wide open and effectively endorsed by Apple.
    Can still hope though!
    James

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  3. Ricardo Varela says:
    February 9, 2010 at 5:24 PM

    for what is worth, some operators are already working on some privacy-data related issues (like those about location) in similar terms to these from Apple. I may have a presentation regarding these soon, but for now the ones that I know are public are Vodafone’s, but with more info to come next week in MWC

    http://www.betavine.net/bvportal/resources/location/designprinciples

    I know the people in charge of this so if you have any feedback for them, will be pleased to do an introduction