I’ve juggling with the idea of writing about location based social networking privacy issues for many weeks. From any side I tried to approach this issue I remained with more questions than answers.
I considered starting with the Fourth Amendment, even though GPS technology didn’t exist in 1791. Not entering into a legal discussion my first impression is that the emphasis here is on personal security. That’s when I remembered my first digital camera and my wife being terrified to put pictures of our kids on the web. It wasn’t about privacy, but about the reasonable expectancy of keeping our kids secure and avoiding people delving into our lives.
I believe this is the paradox of social networks in general and those based on location in particular. I want to make my information public but at the same time I want to keep the information secured (actually not the information but myself).
Looking over the other side of the table, the value of a social network resides on the information you provide. The lack of privacy is one of the pillars that sustain the business models of many, if not all, social networks. When privacy issues are raised, we usually ask what the companies are doing to protect their customers. Expecting the companies to protect your privacy is like expecting the cat to safeguard the cream; this is the fuel for their business. It’s not the companies that need to protect the information, rather YOU the customer.
I reviewed the privacy policies of more than 20 location based social networks and personal locator devices. I recommend you to do so before you start posting When and Where you are doing your What and with Whom. But if we separate the concepts of Privacy and Security, I don’t think the Location Based Social Networks companies are the problem. Technology is usually neutral, users aren’t.
Personally I don’t mind if a company, in exchange for a service, collects information about my habits, locations, and other details IF before using that information ALL personal identification is completely deleted AND is never used to sell something back to ME. The fact I’m a public person and I share information, is not an invitation to invade my space. My space is on invitation ONLY. Once we agree on this principle, we can start talking about other technological barrier and safeguard such as location acquisition and capture, location notification and accuracy, location information accessibility, location history control, location ownership, etc.
Today as in 1791 Privacy and Safety are really a concern and privacy advocates have a central role in corporate LBS
Without any doubt, the accessibility of GPS technology is leading us to new types of communities and services. People participate in a virtual world without borders; People are part of virtual societies, sometime bigger than the population of many countries. Maybe “We the People” needs to virtually govern ourselves and establish the new social conduct standards for a completely different world.
So, where do you stand?
6 Comments
Comment by Bernd Wiegmann — January 21, 2009 @ 3:19 am
For me there are two parts of this. The first is the privacy policy and how it is kept. It might be ok to tell all the people in a certain group my location all the time but I cannot be sure that the information isn’t used in some other way. This is a similar problem with other personal data right now. There is a big black market and all somebody gets is some hand-slapping if he is cought but this is by far not enough to discourage people to get some millions from selling data.
The second acpect of location aware social networks is that is sounds like a good idea but in practice many people just don’t want to share this information. For me it is similar to video telephony. It looks like a good idea but how many people do you know who actually use it? I don’t want all the people in some groups to know all the time where I am. If I go for a beer to the pub around the corner I don’t want some of the freaks I know from some discussion group to show up and discuss their JavaScript problems or worse, but on the other hand I would like to know where they are so I could avoid them.
But maybe I’m just one of the old digital stone-age guys who is to paranoid and all the other more adapted people know how to turn all this to their advantage
Comment by Tom Foale — January 21, 2009 @ 7:34 am
Personal privacy is essential. Many people don’t know how to deal with the public/private aspects of online services like Facebook. Only recently several people have been fired in the UK for discussing company redundancy plans on people’s Facebook Walls. I believe there is going to be a backlash against sharing information online because many people don’t understand the structure of the internet (my kids came home from school convinced the internet was in the broadband modem because when it was off the internet didn’t work). They therefore don’t know where the demarcations between public and private are and, once burned, will avoid all social websites just in case. I’m already seeing this among the non-IT literate friends I have – they are confused and concerned.
Comment by KC Coburn — January 21, 2009 @ 2:34 pm
As an individual whose personal information was once used by a criminal to victimize me and my children, this issue hits home. I can be found online, easily, despite my efforts to protect the details of my personal life from people who would harm me or my family (and they ARE out there, it’s not just in the movies, folks). As a business owner I NEED to have certain aspects of my information, philosophy, abilities, activities etc visible to be “authentic.” I heard what you said re: reading the privacy policies, but what if my business model requires that I twit, tweat and broadcast? How authentic can I be with an alias? I know this isn’t the purpose of your blog, but I was hoping to read about solutions or suggestions at some point. If you have resources an individual can use I’d love to learn about them and pass them on to my peers who use social media to market their products and services.
Comment by Natalie Cutsforth — January 22, 2009 @ 12:54 pm
I was at a Homeland Security conference in October. Online social networking came up as a panel question. The concensus response was that online social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn help officials easily track connections between individuals groups suspects on a global level. Given the direction of the conversation it apears that while you can define your own privacy settings it doesn’t restrict access to those with the power to access information.
Another aspect of this is how your personal life can be accessed by your business contacts when applying for a job.
Comment by Mark Cwirko — January 23, 2009 @ 3:34 pm
Privacy is a multi-faceted question in LBS social networking.
1) The biggest issue for whether or not you can be located, is the potential for immediate physical/mental harm. If you are dealing with teens/kids, then this is a very real issue. In the wrong hands this information can be abused. And they are not always aware of the potential predatory behavior of social deviants around them. In the hands of your family/friends, this information can be very useful. So in general, privacy (in some manner) is required to ensure the safety of the individual.
2) Who should control privacy? Is it the end user, is it a designated guardian (i.e. Parent, or even a Supervisor for a work-related application), or is it controlled by the Application or Carrier? Most applications have trended towards allowing the individual to control this for themselves for that specific application. Some carriers have experimented with centralized privacy to not only store privacy settings (for a specific application or even across application), but also to authenticate any requests for Location from the requestor. This is a key question – which the market has trended towards individual privacy settings for individual applications. This trend may change if harm is brought to any individual subscribers that can be traced back to security lapses that may have helped prevent the issue from occurring.
3) Work vs. Personal applications. Can a company who has supplied the worker with a phone and paying them for labor services track (without constraints) the whereabouts of an employee? What if someone is on a lunch break? What if someone is running a personal errand? What if someone is on call, yet officially is off work that day? How much control of their location is the employee afforded? What if the employee does not have total control of their whereabouts (i.e. Is a passenger in a vehicle being driven by another employee who strays?)? For Personal applications, someone may want their friends/family to locate them most of the time – but may want the ability to turn this off at times (for moral or immoral reasons)? Who gets to make the call? Can you have different privacy settings for personal friends in your social network vs. professional friends in your social network? (i.e. Does my neighbor need to know what I’m up to at work? Does my boss need to know where I’m spending my time on the weekend or during my vacation?) To me, this necessitates some kind of temporal criteria for any privacy application (time of day, days of the week).
4) Government rules. In the United States there are a number of privacy laws legislated (other than the 4th amendment) which require a reasonably strict privacy be in place. In other countries there is less legislation in place. So the social networking application should have the ability to adjust the privacy settings per carrier or per country.
If I were an application developer, I would take the time to design strong temporal and spatial individual privacy settings into the application, and then make it easy to “default” them in the situation where privacy is not considered as big of an issue. This will allow you to have one application that can be used internationally as needed, and customized for privacy concerns for the individual carrier/country.
In general, LBS is great! Who doesn’t love their navigation system? And, in general, social networking is connecting millions of people each day in a positive way. So the emerging LBS social networking space affords a fantastic opportunity. But the application(s) needs to be aware of the potential for abuse and give some ability to control who has access to that information. To not have it at all is likely too much of a risk for an application developer/carrier to take.
Comment by James Wu — June 18, 2009 @ 1:35 pm
Just wanted to say thanks for the great post ! Found your blog on Google and I’m happy I did. I’ll be reading you on a regular basis ! Thanks again
Thanks,
Donna
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.