Posts tagged as "mining"

Where You Are Isn't That Interesting But Where You Will Be Is

Every once in a while the thorny topic of location privacy rears its ugly head, often in tandem with a new location based service or the discovery of what an existing one is really doing. There's often cries of "Big Brother" and "company X is tracking me" as well. But lost in the rhetoric and hyperbole around this subject is a well hidden fact ... your current location isn't actually that interesting to anyone apart from yourself.

For most of the day we tend to be on the move so even if a service does know your location that fact becomes irrelevant almost immediately. Intrusive location based advertising is normally held up for inspection here but without context a location is just a set of longitude and latitude coordinates, coordinates that are out of date and no longer relevant almost as soon as they've been detected.

Maybe a location based service I use does want to target me with location based ads, but for example, if I'm on my irregular commute from the suburbs to the centre of London on a train, I challenge anyone to find an ad, intrusive or not, that would be contextually relevant to me in sufficient detail that would warrant an advertiser paying out the not insignificant sums that such ad campaigns cost. Unless maybe, just maybe, it's an ad that offers me a viable alternative to SouthWestTrain's execrable and expensive train service, but that's just in the realms of fantasy.