Location Privacy Is Heating Up

Last month, the Management Association for Private Photogrammetric Surveyors (MAPPS) issued a position letter to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) urging the FCC to “use extreme caution and not implement any enforcement or broad regulation that would have a harmful affect on the broad private geospatial community.”

The concern MAPPS has is valid and I support their position stated in their letter.

MAPPS references an Associated Press article published November 10 that states that the FCC is investigating Google’s activities, including photographing neighborhoods for its Street View mapping feature.

Google Street View

The MAPPS announcement also references H.R. 5777, introduced in Congress earlier this year, according to MAPPS. If it is passed, MAPPS is concerned it would create “havoc in the geospatial marketplace and community.”

The issue of location privacy is not a simple one. In fact, it’s a complex subject that has far-reaching implications. To compound the issue, it’s a highly technical subject that easily exceeds the capacity of the average state/federal legislator and administrator to understand. Therefore, they will rely on legislative assistants, industry folks, and lobbyists to guide them. That being the said, it’s important that the professional geospatial folks have a chair at the table.

Notice I wrote “professional” geospatial folks. I did that intentionally. The reason is because surveying, GIS, engineering folks, and other people who create, manage and/or use geospatial data in the course of their daily professions will be affected by the fallout of legislative action taken in this area. In short, we will become collateral damage in a much larger battle.

Whether you’re an engineer, surveyor, GIS professional, county planner, or CAD technician, the geolocation privacy battle being fought has nothing to do with what you do for a living. The privacy issue would be easy to address if it was only just one or two companies that need an attitude adjustment. However, that’s not the case. The big kahuna is LBS (location-based services).

I’m super-excited about LBS applications. At least for me, I think it has a tremendous potential to make my life a lot more efficient and productive. Just think of what GPS and digital maps has done for you in the last five years. Getting lost is a thing of the past with your trusty Magellan/Garmin/TomTom on the dashboard. I don’t know how to calculate the number of hours it has saved me (and my wife) since I started using GPS navigation on a daily basis in 2004, but I know the number is big and I know hundreds of dollars I’ve spent on GPS navigation devices has paid for itself easily a hundred times over.

Given that, I start salivating when I think of how a new breed of LBS apps will provide me new tools to help manage my life more efficiently. For me, the value is connecting my friends/family and my stuff. I’ve got a wife and four kids, with three of them playing school sports and one in college. Being able to text message them helps, but that requires an action on their part. If they’re in class, at practice, at home, out with friends, etc. and don’t see the text message (or there’s a delay in the wireless network), I don’t hear back. Being able to know where they are, without action on their part, is worth a lot to me. Ok, I realize you may think I’m a control-freak of sorts, but actually I’m far from it. I’m more of an efficiency-freak. I’m consistently over-committed and always looking for ways to save time, and I see LBS apps as huge time-savers.

I wrote an article about the value of LBS to me (and privacy) earlier this year, and then a couple of months later I wrote an article after some idiot stole my car. If I’d had my car wire up with an LBS app, it would have saved me a lot of time and grief and would have provided a lot of satisfaction in seeing the thief in handcuffs. LBS goes way farther than connecting people and tracking my stuff. In fact, we don’t understand how far it’s going to go yet.

One example is a technology called augmented reality. I’ve written about this in the past. From the safety aspect alone, it’s a tremendous technology. Look at this video from General Motors. Location is only part of the solution, but it’s a critical part and goes way beyond what the GM video discusses. Think about if a spatial database was accessible and you would be warned of accident-prone intersections or dangerous curves ahead of time via the Head-Up-Display (HUD). In a more efficiency-oriented application of augmented reality, check out this video from BMW.

For those of you who enjoy shopping on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving), this year you could have used an app from Dealmap.com on your iPhone or Android phone to access a map of deals at more than 52,000 retail store locations.

Dealmap.com Android app

Ok, enough said about the up side of LBS apps.

Of course, the core technology behind LBS apps is the L word: location. The apps generally make decisions based on where you are. If you’re driving down the street, a coupon may pop-up on the screen of your phone for a fast-food restaurant you are approaching, or a map might be displayed on your phone of all the bargain prices of LCD TV’s within three miles of your current location.

This type of technology frightens people a lot. They assume that if their phone knows where they are, someone is watching. It really depends on what kind of app is running on your phone.

Stealing from the article I wrote last February:

Of course, a major concern by regulators and potential users is how personal location information will be used by the LBS application software. Will this be just another way that your personal information will be collected and sold to spammers? In addition to spammers, do you really want your family/friends knowing where you are 24/7? These are not unreasonable concerns.

I don’t worry about privacy with LBS applications and I’ll tell you why.

There is a lot of hyper-sensitivity about privacy with LBS applications (House congressional hearing
this week on the subject) so I think LBS software vendors are well aware that a line has been drawn in the sand and a sort of zero-tolerance policy has been established. Secondly, leading LBS companies were involved with CTIA (The Wireless Association) in developing a document titled “Best Practices and Guidelines for Location-Based Services,” so they are intimately aware of the privacy issue.

There are two guiding principles in the Best Practices guidelines mentioned above:

1. LBS providers must inform users about how their location information will be used, disclosed, and protected so that a user can make an informed decision whether or not to use the LBS or authorize disclosure.
2. Once a user has chosen to use an LBS, or authorized the disclosure of location information, he or she should have choices as to when or whether location information will be disclosed to third parties and should have the ability to revoke any such authorization. Read the entire CTIA Best Practices guideline here.

The Final Analysis on LBS Apps

One consideration I will give when subscribing to a LBS app in the future is to make sure I subscribe either through my wireless service provider (Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, etc.) or through an established, reputable LBS app provider. This kind of due diligence is no different from when you consider purchasing an application for your personal computer. Common sense tells you not to download an app from Nigeria. You’ll need to practice the same diligence when selecting an LBS application.

I also wouldn’t consider an LBS application where I don’t have the opportunity to control my personal network of people who are granted access to my current whereabouts. In fact, I’d want the ability to shut off broadcasting my location altogether. Again, I think that any mainstream LBS application will have these features due to the high-profile sensitivity to privacy.

I know the LBS applications are already available to accomplish the people-connecting that I want. But, like I wrote earlier, I don’t live on the bleeding edge of technology. I live a step back from the edge. I wasn’t the first to join Facebook (although I’m glad I eventually did) and I won’t be the first to run a people-connecting LBS application, but there’s no doubt in my find that it will eventually be an important tool for me and, most likely, you, too. The upside is just too big to ignore.

What about the Geospatial Professional?

I think it’s very important that the geospatial professional, whether a surveyor, an engineer, a GIS’r, or a CAD technician, not be loaded up with unreasonable liability by the FCC or other governing body as a result of the fall-out from LBS apps. It will be very easy for legislators (and voters), who are uneducated on this matter, for geospatial professionals to be tossed into the LBS barrel.

This subject had me thinking about a measure that voters just passed in the State of Oregon. The title of the measure was “Requires Increased Minimum Sentences for Certain Repeat Sex Crimes, Incarceration for Repeated Driving Under Influence.” Of course, like privacy, this is a very emotional issue. Given the title of the measure, without further study, most people would vote in favor of such a measure. Who wouldn’t? With further study, you might find it wasn’t such a good measure to pass into law (it passed). This opinion piece ran in the Portland newspaper, The Oregonian, and spells out why it’s not such a good idea. Among other things, there’s collateral damage.

Likewise, the public and the industry can’t afford for geospatial professionals to be swept into the privacy dustpan with LBS apps.
Thanks, and see you next week.

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