Posts Tagged: privacy

Journal — 3 Comments
31
Aug 10

Facebook Places; Haven’t We Been Here Before?

A week and a half ago Facebook finally launched their Places feature to a predictable media furore over location privacy, regardless of whether it’s justified or not and, to location industry watchers at least, a strong sense of deja vu. Haven’t we been here before?

Let’s look at the key issues that seem to be getting people hot, bothered and generally up in arms.

Deja vu the first. According to Facebook, at the time of writing they have 500M users. But how many of them will actually use the service, regardless of whether they’ve updated their privacy settings?

Deja vu the second. So you decide you want to use Facebook Places? Only on an iPhone I’m afraid or from Facebook’s HTML5 mobile web site. Want an Android or Nokia app? You’re out of luck, for now. Want to use it outside the US? You’re even more out of luck, for now.

Facebook Places. The UK Version

Deja vu the third. So you decide you don’t want to use Facebook Places? It’s a location app so there’s bound to be privacy implications. Granted, Facebook have chosen to go down the opt-out route for location privacy, though you still have to physically use the service, but even the most cursory of web searches for “disable facebook places” yields loads of different takes on the same basic set of actions. Cult of Mac and ReadWriteWeb have great write ups, in non threatening, non technical language for how to ensure Facebook Places never sullies your Facebook stream.

Now take a step back, re-read the three points above and substitute, in order, Google’s Latitude, Foursquare’s, err, Foursquare and Yahoo’s Fire Eagle for Facebook Places. Granted the opt-out vs. opt-in approach to location sharing differs substantially (for Latitude, Foursquare and Fire Eagle it’s implicitly opt-in) but we’ve been here before. Many times. A new location sharing service is launched, people get worried due to media coverage and eventually the status quo is restored and everyone gets on with their lives as before, maybe with an additional bit of location richness added, maybe not. It’s worth bearing this in mind before you buy into the latest media coverage which over-uses the phrase “sparks privacy concerns“.

Update 1/9/10 – turns out I’m not the only one thinking along these lines. After I originally posted this, my daily trawl through my RSS feeds uncovered a post from Jonathan Crowe over at The Map Room blog that draws pretty much the same conclusions over Facebook Places as I do.

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Journal — 5 Comments
20
May 10

Latitude Inconsistitude

In the midst of yesterday’s I/O event, Google announced the launch of the long rumoured API for their Latitude location sharing platform; there’s ample coverage and commentary on ReadWriteWeb and on TechCrunch and that’s just fine because that’s not what I want to write about.

When it was launched in early 2009, Latitude was the receipt of some fairly harsh press from the informed tech media and from the uninformed traditional media and I argued for some latitude in the discussions on, err, Latitude.

Latitude kept on getting compared to Yahoo’s Fire Eagle and the main gripes seemed to be:

  1. Latitude is a consumer application built into Google Maps, not a platform
  2. Latitude doesn’t have an API
  3. Latitide’s privacy model is opt-in but all or nothing

So now Latitude has an API and everyone’s happy. Right?

Unofficial Google Latitude T-Shirt

Wrong. The previous gripes have been done away with and replaced with three more gripes.

  1. Latitude needs to run in the background and so will either drain battery life or won’t run in the background on an iPhone at all.
  2. Latitude now has granular privacy controls but these are on the back-end so Google will know your location prior to federating it to location consumers via the API.
  3. Latitude needs a Google account to use.

There’s a lot of inconsistency here.

  1. Latitude, as part of Google Maps, already runs in the background on handsets that support that. The iPhone doesn’t, yet, but that’s an iPhone OS issue not a Latitude issue. Short battery life is a feature of almost all smartphone class handsets, Latitude or not.
  2. Latitude gains granular privacy controls but they’re on the back-end so this is a bad thing. Fire Eagle has granular privacy controls and they’re on the back-end but this has never been a source of complaint.
  3. Latitude needs a Google account to use. Correction. Latitude has always needed a Google account to use, so this is a bad thing. Fire Eagle has always needed a Yahoo! Id to use, and yet this is something not seen as a contentious issue.

One of the criticisms that was levelled at Fire Eagle was lack of a definitive consumer application at launch; a not unfair criticism. Latitude’s taken the inverse approach, launching with a consumer application and then opening up an API almost a year later.

Time will tell which of these two location sharing platforms will dominate or whether they will be usurped by another unseen contender.

Photo Credits: moleitau on Flickr.
Written and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)
Journal — 2 Comments
5
May 10

Facebook’s (Creepy) Bid For Your Homepage

Most browsers have a variation on the theme of a home page, which automagically loads your favourite web page when you start the browser or open a new browser window or tab.

A lot of web sites try to capitalise on this, offering earnest entreaties to “make me your home page” … “no make me your home page” … “no, choose me for your home page, I have so much personalised content”.

They’re needy and somewhat neurotic entities these web sites, it’s not like I can have all of them as my home page.

Most of them personalise their content for you, based on a registration setting or some other insight, to give you what they think is the information your looking for.

This is not creepy.

A large amount of web sites are advertising supported and serve up ads which, again, are personalised, either from a demographic, behavioural or geographic point of view (sometimes it’s just from plain old fashioned key word matching with often hilarious results).

This is still not creepy.

But then this morning Facebook told me it wants to be my home page.

We've noticed you use Facebook regularly ... That's Creepy

Like most people I’ve evolved a filtering mechanism which understands why I’m being asked and which either ignores such pleas or uses the minimal amount of effort and mouse clicks to convey the message “buzz off, you’re not going to be my homepage and don’t bug me again“. I’m politely paraphrasing here you understand.

But when Facebook offers to be my home page because, and I’m quoting here, it’s noticed I use Facebook regularly … that smacks of Big Brother and is most definitely creepy, whichever way I look at it.

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21
Mar 10

Geo on the Horizon at Horizon Geo

Last Friday I ventured north to Nottingham, along with Ed Parsons, Steven Feldman and Muki Haklay to attend the one day Supporting the Contextual Footprint event run by the Horizon Digital Economy Research institute at the University of Nottingham. Along the way I discovered a manner of tracking my journey that I’d hadn’t previously considered, but that’s covered in a previous blog post.

The focus of the Horizon event was to discuss the infrastructure needed to support location in its role as a key context and to identify any research theme that came out of the discussions; a classic case of the ill defined and fuzzy interface between the commercial world and that of academia.

The day was split into three thematic tracks:

  • The Location Challenge
    • What are the challenges specific to the capture and management of location data?
    • What is the state-of-the-art in the technologies available to store, query and present location data?
    • How do we understand location in context, especially in real-time, on the move?
  • Whose Data Is It Anyway?
    • What data should be considered “personal”?
    • Should I “own” data about me, such as where I am, my home electricity usage, my bank transactions?
    • How can users be enabled and encouraged to manage this data?
    • What technologies are available to do this?
    • How, when and by whom should “personal” data be exploited?
    • What checks and balances should be in place to protect all stakeholders, including both citizens and service innovators?
  • Can Crowds Be Authoritative?
    • Crowd sourcing is a powerful technique for data collection enabled by modern handheld devices, but how far can user-contributed data be trusted?
    • What are the processes required in order to meld crowd-sourced data with existing, authoritative, datasets?
    • What are the legal implications of generating, combining and using such user-generated datasets?
    • For example, what environmental details could citizen sensors collect?
    • How might this change our understanding of the live state of the world?

Take A Little Time With Me

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9
Feb 10

The Location Battle Between You and Your Phone

Whenever I talk about the privacy implications inherent in sharing your location with an app or service, I keep coming back to the idea that it’s essential to be your own source of truth for your location. This is a slightly verbose way of saying that you need to be able to lie about your location or that you need to be able to say “no, I really am here” despite what other location contexts such as GPS, cell tower triangulation or public wifi MAC address triangulation may have to say on the matter.

Of course, it’s never quite as straightforward as that and here’s why. The two location based mobile services that are getting a lot of coverage at the moment are FourSquare and Gowalla. They both rely on their users checking into a location by saying “here I am” and as a neat side effect they’re generating a geo-tagged set of local business and POI listings, thus verifying and adhering to my Theory of Stuff. But more about that in my next post, for now let’s concentrate on their user’s location.

Much has been made of FourSquare’s approach to checking in; you’re presented with a list of places nearby, generated according to your A-GPS location, for you to check into. But you can also search for places and check into them as well. Some commentators view this as a failing in their model, allowing for someone to check in to a location and maintain their Mayor status, from their comfort of their own sofa. Now granted if you wish to game FourSquare this will allow you to do so, but it also allows you to be your own source of truth. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve stood in the middle of the concourse in London’s Waterloo Station and Waterloo has not been amongst the choices of place that FourSquare presents me to check into, yet I’ve been able to do so by searching for the place and then forcing FourSquare to accept that “yes, I really am here“.

Gowalla takes a different approach and relies entirely on the accuracy of the A-GPS system on my phone. If your phone doesn’t agree with you on the matter of location then you can’t check in, as the screen capture below shows.

I’m currently in California visiting the Yahoo! mothership; at the time when I took this screenshot I was seated in Yahoo! Building E, which already exists as a spot in Gowalla. My iPhone disagreed with me and insistent I was some 120 meters away in the middle of the Lockheed Martin parking lot on nearby Moffett Field and as a result it just wouldn’t let me check in. FourSquare, also taking its cue from the A-GPS on my iPhone had the same problem but was quite happy to let me override this and check in to its version of the Yahoo! Building E place.

So which approach provides the best user experience? I’d strongly argue that the Gowalla approach frustrates users by effectively saying I know better than you, whilst FourSquare’s approach, whilst able to be gamed and abused, allows the user to insist that they do know best in these circumstances. Only time will tell which approach will succeed, but being your own source of  truth continues to be of major significance when sharing your location with the world at large.

Written at the Sheraton Hotel, Sunnyvale, California (37.37159, -122.03824) and posted from the Yahoo! campus, Sunnyvale, California (51.5143913, -0.1287317)

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6
Feb 10

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

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.
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18
Jan 10

Footprints (Of the Digital Variety)

One of the things I write about a lot on this blog are the areas of location and online, or digital, identity and how these two areas overlap and sometimes conflict.

I write about this stuff not only because I’m lucky enough to work in both of these areas but I also find them fascinating, compelling and nowhere is this more evident in how individuals and organisations views this arena.

Companies, if they’re foresighted enough, are making major plays in the location field, fuelled by the proliferation of location aware devices (cameras, phones, netbooks and the like) and by the convergence of these devices (I use an iPhone … is it a phone, a camera, a GPS unit, an internet terminal, a computer or some combination of them all?). There’s much value to a company in knowing your customer’s location and how it changes over time. Indeed it’s a truism that it’s much less about where you are now and much more about where you’ve been.

Individuals, if they’re informed enough, know about the plays the companies are making in the location field and  should know how to determine the value proposition that is offered when they give up their location.

There’s a lot of online coverage, some of it shrill and hysterical, some of it downright amusing and some of it in between these two extremes.

But despite the extensive online coverage of this area it’s still a truth that the printed word sometimes carries greater weight than the online equivalent. There’s still something very visceral and real about holding a book in your hand, flipping back and forth through the pages and taking in what message the book is trying to deliver.

Last year, I was fortunate enough to be asked to be a contributor to a book on identity, privacy, trust and the direction of the Web by Tony Fish. My Digital Footprint, explores where next for the net, for the associated business models, who owns your data and how value and wealth will be created. 

The book is about the digital data created from your interactions with electronic devices, such as mobile phones, web PCs and TVs. This data has significant value, when analysed and fed-back, to create services with colour, focus and relevancy for you as a user, as well as to brands, who want to own your whole digital life experience.

Digital footprint data is valuable and is the reason why the ownership of this data class is the Web’s next battleground. The two central ideas which underpin value in My Digital Footprint are: the real-time feedback loop and the role of the mobile device in enriching the value of the data. The ability to get data out of or off a mobile device lends itself to the unique advantage a mobile device has. The book explores how the mobile device once prevailed for the consumption of content and has evolved to enable the capturing of data on what and how we consume and with whom. 

Just like Marmite, some people like the idea of digital footprints and some do not, but, irrespective of personal preference, we all leave digital footprints behind us and they are about much more than just identity. Digital footprints are about where we have been, for how long, how often; with whom and the inter-relationships we formed in getting there. Digital footprints are memories and moments and not your personal identity, your passport, bank account or social security number.

Read this book, either for free online or grab a copy from Amazon and not because I contributed but because if you use the net today, you really need to know about how companies want your location information and about how you can make an informed decision about how to manage and control this.

Photo credit: Paraflyer on Flickr

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19
Nov 09

Location Privacy Issue? I See No Location Privacy Issue

Telematics, the use of GPS and mobile technology within the automotive business, and the Web 2.0, neo and paleo aspects of location have traditionally carved parallel paths, always looking at if they would converge but somehow never quite making enough contact to cross over.

But not any more.

The combination of 3G mobile communications and GPS enabled smart-phones such as the iPhone and the BlackBerry means that one way or another, the Internet and the Web are coming into the car, either in your pocket or into the car itself.

With this in mind, last week I was at the Telematics Munich 2009 conference, which was coincidentally in Munich, giving a talk on some of the challenges we face with location and how the world of telematics can benefit by starting to look at location technologies on the Web.

One of the sessions I sat in on prior to my talk was on the eCall initiative. This is a pan European project to help motorists involved in a collision. A combination of onboard sensors, a GPS unit and a cellular unit detect when an accident has occured and sends this information to the local emergency services. The idea is that in circumstances where a vehicle’s occupants are unable to call for help, the car can do it for them.

So far, so public spirited and well meaning. But several things immediately stood out.

Firstly, while pitched as a pan European initiative, each member state has an opt out and naturally not all states have signed up to the initiative, including the United Kingdom.

Secondly, eCall is designed to be a secure black box system, but all the talk in Munich was of “monetize eCall offerings by integrating contactless card transactions like road-tolling, eco-tax and easy parking payment” or “how to geo-locate data messages to offer ubiquitous solutions“. In other words, adding value added services on top of a system which is actively able to track you at all times and which you, as the vehicle owner, has limited access to or control over.

But what really stood out was that there was not a single mention of location tracking and of the privacy aspects that this carries with it. Not a single mention. Not from the panel, not from the chair and not from the audience. Once rolled out, eCall as currently designed is pretty much mandatory in all new vehicles. Compare and contrast this with the outraged Daily Mail style diatribe that other, opt in, systems such as Yahoo’s Fire Eagle and Google’s Latitude have attracted.

The convergence of the internet, the web and telematics hasn’t yet happened but it will. It’s also evident that when this happens, the telematics industry may have a painful awakening as the impact of location technologies and the privacy issues they carry pervade into an industry which hasn’t needed to deal with this historically.

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10
Oct 09

Loosing My Flickr Innocence

We all produce lots of online content these days; photos, videos, blogs, microblogs, status updates, Tweets, that sort of thing. Most of the pictures I produce go up on my Flickr account and there’s a lot of photos, almost 3.5 thousand at the last count. Most of these almost 3.5 thousand photos are of my family, my wife, my children and last year I changed my default upload model from “anyone can see this” to “only friends and family can see this” and I went back and changed permissions on those photos I’d uploaded. On all of them. Or so I thought.

I’m writing this in my hotel room in New York, where I’ve been taking part in Yahoo’s Open Hack NYC event and I’ve been taking a lot of photos which I’ve been posting to Flickr. Some people seem to like these photos and favourite them; each time this happens I get a nice friendly mail from Flickr telling me this.

So this morning I went and looked at all the photos of mine that had been added as a favourite and I didn’t like what I found. There was a photo taken last year while on holiday; a photo of one of my children, a photo which I thought was “friends and family only“. I didn’t recognise the Flickr account name of the person who liked this shot so much, so I took a look at their profile. One of the things in your profile are the groups you belong to … I belong to two, both tech related. This person belonged to a lot and I had to scroll down a page to see them all. They were all of an adult nature, seeming to be centred around sharing snaps of other peoples spouses; you know the sort of thing.

This was creepy. Very creepy.

So I blocked the user and went through all of my photos to ensure that nothing else was inadvertantly exposed to public view that I didn’t want and luckily nothing was. I checked the Flickr Community Guidelines and one of them seemed to fit the situation really well.

So if you previously used to watch my Flickr account for photos, you’ll be a little disappointed as they’ve vanished from public view. I’m sorry about that. If I know you and you’d like to see them, just add me as a Flickr contact. If you don’t have a Flickr account and don’t want one, then please drop me a mail and I’ll send you a guest pass link to use. I probably shouldn’t be shocked or surprised by this but I am and today it feels just a bit like my Flickr innocence was lost. I’ll get over it and be a little bit older, a little bit wiser and just a little bit more careful in the future. 

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24
Sep 09

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.

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