Location and Privacy - Where Do We Care?

As part of this year's AGI GeoCommunity '09 conference, I took part in the Privacy: Where Do We Care? panel on location and the implications for privacy with Terry Jones, Audrey Mandela and Ian Broadbent, chaired and overseen by conference chair Steven Feldman.

Our location is probably the single most valuable facet of our online identity, although where I currently am, whilst interesting, is far less valuable and  personal than where I've been. Where I've been, if stored, monitored and analysed, provides a level of insight into my real world activities that transcends the other forms of insight and targeting that are directed at my online activities, such as behavioural and demographic analysis.

Where I've been, my location stream if you will, is a convergence of online and real world identity and should not be revealed, ignored or given away without thought and without consent.In the real world we unconsciously provide differing levels of granularity in our social engagements when we answer the seemingly trivial question "where have you been?". To our family and close friends we may give a detailed reply ... "I was out with colleagues from work at Browns on St. Martin's Lane, London", to other friends and colleagues we may give a more circumspect reply ... "I was out in the Covent Garden area" and to acquaintances, a more generalised reply ... "I was in Central London" or even "mind your own business"

As with the real world, so we should choose to reveal our location to applications and to companies online with differing levels of granularity, including the ability to be our own source of truth and to conceal ourselves entirely, in other words, to lie about where I am. Where I am in the real world should be revealed to the online world only on an opt-in basis, carefully considered and with an eye on the value proposition that is being given to me on the basis of revealing my location to a third party. My location is mine and mine alone and I should never have to opt out of revealing where am I and where I've been.

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

The Geo Ice Has Broken

Last night was the icebreaker for the AGI GeoCommunity conference in Stratford-upon-Avon (but not Stratford-upon-Avon, oh no, that's the district not the town you know) and the run up to the conference has started extremely well, with the added bonus for me that John McKerrell of mapme.at used a quote from one of my decks as the #geocom landing page. Twitter is abuzz with commentary on what's happening and who's going to be doing what, all accompanied by the eponymous #geocom hashtag and everyone's hoping that the conference lives up to their expectations. As Thierry Gregorious aptly put it on Twitter "#geocom If this feed is producing messages at current rate, will people be glued to their mobiles instead of the presentations?" ... we shall see.The ice breaker dinner well and truly broke ice and I landed up on a table full of geostrangers and Andrew Turner; as table 24 we put in a rather respectable joint second place in the 100 question quiz, but then crashed and burned to 3rd place after not being nearly accurate enough in the tie-breaker question on when precisely did the Berlin Wall come down.After a surprisingly good dinner, with surprisingly good wine we sat through a surprising, and intriguing, comedienne who appeared to be the result of a union between Jasper Carrot and Victoria Wood. It was certainly an experience.Finally everyone headed to the bar where some overworked and entirely good natured bar staff served us geolibations, geolagulavins and geo-gin-and-tonics until the early hours.And the conference hasn't even begun yet ... Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

Deliciousness: themes gained, avatars lost, accents found, London and the end of the world, scrobbling and Streetview

Look at all of this stuff that fell down the back of the internet and got lodged in my Delicious bookmarks ...

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

Oh No! Not Rain

It rained last night in London. This is not news. This is not even an uncommon occurence. Granted, it was heavy rainfall, as evidenced by the windows of the restaurant in Soho last night being drenched every time a car went up Wardour Street and by the tree branch which was floating off down the road outside my house.

None of this explains why our public transport infrastructure seems to come to a sudden shuddering stop everytime the weather (rain, snow, autumn leaves, frost, ice) for which this country is reknown, actually happens. I'm sure the Victorians didn't have this sort of problem when they built the railways and I'm sure they had pumps to get rid of the rain when it collected, inconveniently, in tunnels too.

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

Delicousness: iPhones, boarding passes, Cult of Mac, nerd subclasses, Snow Leopard and weird ads

The end of the week, semi regular, hand selected, carefully edited snapshot of what made it into my Delicious bookmarks this week.

  • Last week I blogged about my experiences with an electronic boarding pass, hosted on my iPhone, while travelling home from Amsterdam's Schipol airport. Cult of Mac came across it, liked it, and used it as a basis for an article. Which was nice.
  • Remember those Venn Diagrams you did in maths class? Now you can use one to work out which of the subclasses of nerddom you belong to. Naturally I place myself in the geek with a life subclass, which is strangely absent from the diagram.
  • At the weekend I upgraded my work MacBook Pro to Snow Leopard, Apple's latest version of the OS X operating system. And then 4 days later I downgraded it back to Leopard.
  • Want to buy used toilet paper, a used tombstone or a rottweiler called Mr Giggles? Some people think you do.

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

Why Snow Leopard Thawed Back To Leopard

Last weekend I upgraded my MacBook Pro from Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5.8, to Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6. This kind of classes as early adopter behaviour as there's no bug fix release for Snow Leopard out in the wild yet to iron out any kinks or rough edges but I wasn't particularly bothered by this. I've used OS X since version Cheetah, version 10.0 and have gone through the intervening releases, Puma, Jaguar and Panther. With Tiger I stopped using a desktop machine and took a decision to make my Yahoo! supplied MacBook Pro my sole day-to-day machine, an experiment I didn't regret and which has become the norm for me. When Leopard arrived I took the early adopter plunge and upgraded and, apart from a few teething troubles, which I can't even recall now, all was well. Then Snow Leopard arrived and I waited a week, not quite early adoption but early enough. I heard no shouts and screams and even my one blocker, the lack of suitable Cisco VPN support for the version required to connect to Yahoo!, was resolved so I made sure my backup was up-to-date and upgraded. The backup gives me more foresight than I really deserve.

At first all was good. The Exchange server my corporate mail is hosted on is Exchange 2007 and at the right service pack level to work with Snow Leopard's rather stringent requirements. Mail took my authentication credentials and set up my Exchange account, iCal did the same and so did Address Book. Granted they took a while to sync up but that was over a VPN connection, over a wifi link, over my home broadband connection so some slack was cut.

Deliciousness: Mac OS X 15.6, gallons of chilli sauce, globes and Virgin Media

This week's trawl through my Delicous bookmarks. Actually this is last week's trawl but real life got in the way of posting and I beg your indulgence.

  • Last week, Snow Leopard, AKA Mac OS X 10.6 was released though some places seem to now be selling an even more advanced version, Mac OS X 15.6.
  • I like chilli sauce, I have a fine and wide range of the stuff in the larder at home; but some people must really really like the stuff to buy it a gallon at a time.
  • In my day job I do geo stuff but I wasn't aware that a globe, an inflatable one come to that, has sharp corners and isn't suitable for children.
  • While we're on the subject of geo, Virgin Media found out the hard way that place names aren't unique and sometimes there's more than one place sharing a name; Whitchurch in this particular case. Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

GeoCommunity '09 - Bridging the Gap between the GIS and Neogeo Worlds?

It's probably an oversimplification of a complex issue but geographic conferences or events can be somewhat polarised towards one of two extremes. On the one hand you have the solid, slightly reassuring and established GIS world whilst on the other we have the upstart, slightly shouty, web-centric neogeography community. These two worlds don't always co-exist particularly well and each can be equally distrustful of the other. Where 2.0 in the US tries valiantly to get these two worlds to talk to one another and to share a stage but it doesn't always work well; the GIS community brandish their desktop GIS system while the neogeo hackers point to their PHP based web mashups.

But this year in Stratford-upon-Avon something brave, intriguing and altogether worthwhile is happening; both communities are being represented at the AGI's GeoCommunity '09 conference, which takes place in a little over two and half weeks time. Yes, there's GIS practitioners and yes, there's neogeo developers but there's also speakers covering all points inbetween; just take a look at the PDF of programme for this year. Even the tag line for the conference, Realising the Value of Place, places emphasis on the meeting of the geo-worlds.

I Haz Snow Leopard

It was inevitable, but once I'd found out that a new version of the Cisco VPN client was available, the one thing that was stopping me from installing Snow Leopard, then a Snow Leopard upgrade was on the cards. So off to the Apple Store on Regent Street in London I went.

Once home, it was time to see what's in the package, to which the answer was not a lot, as it was even more minimalistic that the Leopard box.

And then on through the best part of an hour's worth of installation with a single reboot roughly half way through.

... and yes, I do have more disk space now that there's no PowerPC support and so there's no Universal binaries and yes, though it's totally subjective it does feel a darn sight faster. Now to test Exchange 2007 support ...

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous