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here but without context a location is just a set of longitude and latitude coordinates, coordinates that are out of date and no longer relevant almost as soon as they've been detected.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.
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here but without context a location is just a set of longitude and latitude coordinates, coordinates that are out of date and no longer relevant almost as soon as they've been detected.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.
Now it's true that if you gather enough data points you can start to infer some meaning from the resultant data set. You can probably determine the rough area where someone works and where they live based on their location at certain times of the day. But in today's connected world of the interwebs, with their social networks and uploaded photographs, that level of locational granularity can be inferred fairly easily without the need to explicitly track the location of an individual.
All of the above can be summed up as something like ...
Where you are right now isn't that interesting. Where you were is slightly more interesting. Where you will be is very interesting.
I'm sure I've said words to this effect before in a talk at a conference but try as I might I can't find a reference to back up this assertion.
What's even more interesting is that a recent research study at the UK's University of Birmingham took 200 volunteers who agreed to have their phones track them, added in the locations of their friends in their social graphs and produced an algorithm that was able to predict where a participant would be in 24 hours time, sometimes with accuracies of less than 20 meters and with an average accuracy of around 1000 meters. The full research paper makes for fascinating reading and shows that the real key to location technologies may not be where you currently are but may be much more about our predicability and daily routines for ourselves and our friends.
meta post, or what Kuro5hin would have called MLP (meaningless link propagation), this post started out as a comment to one of my previousposts on the iOS location caching controversy but soon expanded way beyond a comment into a full blown post.
Firstly, let's get the conspiracy theory out of the way; this theory has been presented in a variety of ways but all of them seem to think that your iOS device is tracking your location and that the reason for this is some shadowy request from government or intelligence agencies. Perhaps the most eloquent case for this was on Frank Reiger's blog.
Now I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next person and Frank’s blog post was a great read. But I have to take issue with the two main points he raises. Firstly there’s “if it was a bug then it would have been fixed … it hasn’t been fixed so it can’t be a bug and must therefore be deliberate“. Secondly there’s “not only has the bug not been fixed but the file even moved location without being fixed so it must be (even more) deliberate“.
More a meta post, or what Kuro5hin would have called MLP (meaningless link propagation), this post started out as a comment to one of my previousposts on the iOS location caching controversy but soon expanded way beyond a comment into a full blown post.
Firstly, let's get the conspiracy theory out of the way; this theory has been presented in a variety of ways but all of them seem to think that your iOS device is tracking your location and that the reason for this is some shadowy request from government or intelligence agencies. Perhaps the most eloquent case for this was on Frank Reiger's blog.
Now I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next person and Frank’s blog post was a great read. But I have to take issue with the two main points he raises. Firstly there’s “if it was a bug then it would have been fixed … it hasn’t been fixed so it can’t be a bug and must therefore be deliberate“. Secondly there’s “not only has the bug not been fixed but the file even moved location without being fixed so it must be (even more) deliberate“.
I’ve worked in the software industry for almost 25 years, many of those cutting code, and can say with hand on heart that bugs, oddities and plain wrong behaviour stay in code bases not because they don’t need to be fixed but because other factors push them down in the priority list, factors such as hard release dates, new features taking precedence and the ill defined side effects of complex software systems not being able to be fully QA’d. Just because a bug or an unforeseen side effect remains in a production code base does not make a conspiracy theory of government or intelligence agency intervention.
We also live in a world of distributed software development teams. It’s enough of a challenge to keep teams in different floors of the same building in synch; it’s even more difficult when language, time zones and different countries get into the mix. Just because the consolidated.db cache moved location again, does not make a conspiracy theory.
So all in all, nice post, great conspiracy theory but, sadly, very little to back up the assertions.
But if your iOS device is tracking or caching your location, why is the data so inaccurate in places, showing places you're pretty sure you haven't been or have visited only fleetingly, yet not showing places you'd think would show up, such as where you live or work?
For the answer to these questions, I'd recommend a thorough reading of Peter Batty's excellent three posts on the topic, which actually digs into the data that is present on iOS devices, rather than making shrill conspiracy theories based on other, equally shrill, media headlines.
An anonymous comment on one of Peter's posts points to a document submitted by Apple to US Congress in July 2010, which includes the following
When a customer requests current location information ... Apple will retrieve known locations for nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi access points from its proprietary database and transmit the data back to the device ... The device uses the information, along with GPS coordinates (if available), to determine its actual location. Information about the device's location is not transmitted to Apple, Skyhook or Google. Nor is it transmitted to any third-party application provider, unless the customer expressly consents
Another comment from Jude on one of Peter's posts makes this observation ...
My Guess?
It's not a list of cell phone locations that you've been to, but the opposite, a list of cell phone locations near you downloaded to the iPhone from Apple in case you move into range of one of them. i.e. At a guess what is happening is location services identifies a cell tower and asks for its location, and is replied to with the list of locations that contains that cell tower, that list is then cached so that it does not need to be requested again.
Of course, this is only a guess based on the wide range of addresses people are seeing and how its near to, but not exactly where, the people have traveled.
So rather than iOS actively and accurately tracking you and reporting this information to some, unspecified, intelligence agency it's actually the complete opposite; your device is actively downloading the next cell tower and, in some cases, wifi information that is near you and where you might be going to provide a better location experience. Which explains the inaccuracy of the locations people have been seeing in their version of the cache data and explains why there's some places they haven't been showing up in the data and why places they have been aren't showing up.
Of course, this information still has personal value and should really be secured by iOS and not by an individual having to secure their handset and encrypt their backups but if anyone still thinks they see the black helicopters circling, it looks more and more unlikely and, as Ed Parsons pointed out, a smartphone without location just isn't ... smart.
Photo Credits: Álvaro Ibáñez and Tom Jervis on Flickr.
Written at home (51.427051, -0.333344) and posted from the Nokia gate5 office in Schönhauser Allee, Berlin (52.5308072, 13.4108176)
deliberately tracking my journey by using Google's Latitude and unexpectedly tracking the same journey by looking at the history of my Foursquare and Gowalla check-ins.
By using the history function from Google Latitude I was able to put together a quick and dirty visualisation of the locations I'd been to but my check-in history added not only the location but also the place that was at each location.
During last week's Geo-Loco conference in San Francisco, Fred Wilson (no, not the guy from the B-52's) mentioned that you could feed your Foursquare check-in history into Google Maps and produce another quick and dirty visualisation of not only the places you'd checked into but also where those places were.
Back in March of this year I wrote about deliberately tracking my journey by using Google's Latitude and unexpectedly tracking the same journey by looking at the history of my Foursquare and Gowalla check-ins.
By using the history function from Google Latitude I was able to put together a quick and dirty visualisation of the locations I'd been to but my check-in history added not only the location but also the place that was at each location.
During last week's Geo-Loco conference in San Francisco, Fred Wilson (no, not the guy from the B-52's) mentioned that you could feed your Foursquare check-in history into Google Maps and produce another quick and dirty visualisation of not only the places you'd checked into but also where those places were.
Simply login to your Foursquare account and visit your feeds page at https://foursquare.com/feeds/ and copy the RSS check-in history link but don't click on the link. Open up Google Maps and paste in the link and add ?count=200 to the end of the URL to make Foursquare return a reasonable amount of check-ins. Hey presto, one instant map of your check-ins, which shows me that I've been checking in in the Bay Area in the USA, in and around London in the UK and in and around Berlin in Germany. Not that I didn't know this already but it's always good to see this visualised on a map.
Of course, Google Maps is a full slippy maps implementation, so I can click, drag and zoom in to see my check-ins from the Geo-Loco conference in San Francisco in the Bay Area, south through Palo Alto to San Jose.
I can also jump across the Atlantic Ocean, straight over the United Kingdom, to Berlin and see Berlin's Tegel Airport in the west and the Nokia Gate5 office in the Mitte district of the city.
With a little bit of time, effort and GIS know-how I could have probably come up with a slick animated trail of my check-ins but sometimes a quick and dirty way of seeing where I've been on a map is all that's needed.
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.
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.
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.
I've been tracking my journeys again and in doing so appear to have discovered the secret of near instantaneous trans Atlantic travel. Apart from the sporadic bad GPS locks, watch as I travel from home to the Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale California and manage to travel from Heathrow to San Francisco in a blink of an eye.
It's all an optical illusion of course, revealed if you watch the timer in the top left hand corner jump from around 11.30 AM to 3.00 PM; due to the lack of Latitude updates whilst I'm in the air.
Using the pre smartphone, pre GPS, pre Latitude method of writing it down, the journey went something like this:
I've been tracking my journey and in doing so inadvertently uncovered a sea change in the way in which we view the whole thorny issue of location tracking.
Drive to Nottingham, stopping at Warwick Services on the M40 for coffee.
Attend the event in Nottingham.
Drive back to London, stopping at Warwick Services on the M40 for more coffee.
Drop rental car off at Heathrow.
Take car home and sleep.
Nothing too controversial there. Using the smartphone, with GPS and with Latitude method of using my BlackBerry, the journey becomes much more detailed and visual but also shows curious blips where I appear to dance around a location. All the more mysterious as they seem to happen when I know I'm in one place and not moving, until I realise they're probably AGPS locks from wifi or cell tower triangulation, kicking in for when my GPS can't get a satellite lock. Playing back the journey on the Google Latitude site looks like this:
Despite the fact that I i) explicitly installed Google Mobile Maps on my BlackBerry, ii) explicitly enabled Latitude in Google Mobile Maps and iii) explicitly enabled location history in my Google Latitude account, a little over 12 months ago, this would have been controversial enough to whip the tabloid media into a privacy infringing frenzy. Looking back to February 2009 in my Delicious bookmarks shows headlines such as Fears that new Google software will spy on workers and Google lets you stalk your friends (which are just plain factually wrong), together with the pointed MPs claim Google Latitude is a threat to privacy: Irony-meter explodes from cnet.
As I went about the events of the day, I checked into my accounts on both Foursquare and on Gowalla. Just take a look at where I checked in and the sequence of check ins.
To start with I check in at the Yahoo! UK office, followed by
* Piccadilly Circus Tube Station
* Terminal 1 (Heathrow)
* Avis (Heathrow)
* Warwick Services (M40)
* Park Inn (Nottingham)
... which is pretty much a simplified version of the above two journeys. I'm tracking my journey here too but where location based social networks are concerned, the media is far more accommodating and enthusiastic; 12 months after Foursquare's launch, 500,000 users, 1.4M venues and 15.5 checkins (with Gowalla either neck and neck, out in front or lagging behind according to differing sources) the most shrill piece of negative publicity that Foursquare was able to garner was a mashup which looked for people publicising check ins on Twitter and inferred that this was an open invitation to the criminal element.
The value proposition of Google Latitude has always been in getting the consumer comfortable with sharing their location with a third party and with your social graph, which isn't good enough for most people to grasp. The value proposition of checking in, keeping tabs on your friends and seeing what they're doing is far more palatable and easier for the consumer to grasp with media coverage pretty much limited to ohh, look at the funny people obsessively checking in sort of article.
As an aside, if I was at Foursquare or Gowalla I'd be looking to mine the rich vein of stealth data that their users are generating at each check in, as it's producing a geotagged and categorised set of local business listings and points of interest. For now though, there's no public sign that either company are doing this, choosing instead to continue to grow their user base and to roll out into new cities and countries.
In the space of a year and with a different face, location tracking has gone from being Big Brother to being one of the hottest pieces of social networking with people at the recent SXSW in Austin TX actively complaining about check-in fatigue because there's so many of these services (Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl, Brightkite, Burbn,MyTown, CauseWorld, Hot Potato, Plancast) to choose from and trying to check into them all can take anything up to 10 minutes.
If all of this talk on location tracking sounds interesting and you're in San Jose CA the week after next at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 locationfest can I strongly recommend that you check out the founder of mapme.at, fellow Brit John McKerrell's session on Why I Track My Location and You Should Too. As long as it doesn't clash with my Where 2.0 session of course!
Photo Credit: moleitau on Flickr.
Written at the Park Inn, Nottingham (52.970538, -1.153335) and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
