Perhaps you don’t track suspected criminals in your spare time, nor do you design or supply a GNSS product that does so. Still, the fresh Supreme Court ruling on GPS use for this purpose reverberates for you, in ways yet unknown. The most interesting part of the court’s ruling pops up in a somewhat open-ended “what if” comment concerning future issues that at least one justice thinks the court should address.
Last week’s Supreme Court ruling on GPS use for tracking criminal suspects makes U.S. law clear on this issue going forward, but it does not address tracking for commercial aspects. One U.S. newspaper editorialized, “the unanimous decision failed to resolve troubling questions about the privacy rights of Americans in the face of intrusive modern surveillance technology.” The privacy picture in other large markets — Europe, Japan, Korea, Russia, China, and elsewhere — remains even less clear. If GNSS should be perceived as a tool of Big Brother (government) or Big Broker (industry selling and buying consumer location data), then all navigation systems acquire a big PR problem, which translates into big funding and modernization problems.
Microsoft is contributing to the latest location privacy jitters. Missteps by Microsoft, Apple, and Google have the potential to dampen uptake of location solutions. Microsoft published the estimated locations of millions of laptops, cell phones, and other devices with Wi-Fi connections. The location database was assembled by Microsoft’s access to Windows phones and by vehicles that drive streets and record Wi-Fi signals accessible from public roads. The data were published on Microsoft’s Live.com website.
It’s July, which means big news is slow to come by—and it is the opportunity to examine what will drive the location-based services market for the rest of 2011…and beyond. So far, consolidation is continuing, with Nokia combining digital mapping giant Navteq into a single LBS unit. In addition, strong entries into the machine-to-machine market include Iridium, while AT&T seeks to increase market share. Privacy issues were a big topic in the first part of the 2011, but will they hamper market growth the rest of the year?
This column rarely covers privacy as a critical issue to build location-based services markets. Why? It was our contention that most LBS are opt-in — or opt out — at the discretion of the consumer, making privacy an important issue, but not a market stopper. Frankly, many privacy panels at location conferences either bordered on hysteria, or were not relevant to market growth. However, since the recent Where 2.0 conference, which revealed that some entities were storing location information without users’ permission, the privacy issue has the potential of suppressing products and markets before they even start. Some are dubbing this new privacy concern Locationgate.
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