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.

Another aspect of this is how your personal life can be accessed by your business contacts when applying for a job.

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