Oh dear. For a few years now I've been talking about how the privacy aspect of today's location technologies is something that may just catapult location into the mainstream, and possibly tabloid, media and probably for the wrong reasons. I envisaged this as being something salacious and potentially titillating, such as two Z List celebrities involved in a high profile divorce case, where they claimed to be in two separate places but their phone's A-GPS showed the complete opposite. If you were at Where 2.0 in San Jose this week or reading the headlines on the web sites of the BBC, The Guardian or BoingBoing, you'd be forgiven for thinking that just such a location media event had happened. But has it? The headlines certainly seem to think so ...

iPhone tracks users' movements ... says the BBC iPhone keeps record of everywhere you go ... says the Guardian Got an iPhone or 3G iPad? Apple is recording your moves .... says O'Reilly Radar iOS devices secretly log and retain record of every place you go ... says BoingBoing

... and when I use the word "says" in reality "screams" would be more accurate.

As a race and as a society we just love our boundaries and our borders; go here, don't go here, this is yours, this is ours. We put up border controls, we tax dependent on what side of the street you live on, you need the right visa stamp in your passport to pass onto this piece of land, which looks identical to the one you're currently standing on but because of a line drawn on a map its ... different.

While lots of the animal kingdom are equally territorial, no one species has managed to invent a whole series of rules and regulations and to employe an entire bureaucracy to ensure the rules and regulations are correctly implemented and patrolled.