Posts Tagged ‘openhacklondon’

Addressing concerns over location sharing

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

I wrote a quick post on Sunday morning about the mobile location sharing hack I wrote at Open Hack London. My post tried to explain the tech behind it, but I wanted to follow it up with a post to explain my thinking around the social innovation in the idea.

Sharing your location with your friends. People have been talking about this for ages, but recently it’s started to hit the mainstream.

More and more mobile phones are coming with GPS. For the ones that don’t, systems like Skyhook and Google Maps for Mobile are getting smarter at using GSM Cell IDs and WiFi access point addresses to work out where you are.

The reaction to this stuff finally arriving for the masses hasn’t all been positive, though. The response to the UK launch of Google Latitude – Google’s mobile application for sharing your location with friends from your Google contact list – is a good example.

A threat to privacy?

Privacy International said that “…Google has created an unnecessary danger to the privacy and security of users…”. They argued that it was too easy for Latitude to be “…enabled by a second party without a user’s knowledge or consent…” and that once enabled it could remain undetected for a long time, with massive potential for abuse.

Liberal Democrat MPs Tom Brake and my local MP Chris Huhne submitted an Early Day Motion to Parliament arguing that Latitude “…could substantially endanger user privacy…” and that “…Google has created an unnecessary danger to user privacy…”.

Tom Brake followed this up with the now widely reported quote that “Google Latitude poses an insidious threat to our hard-won liberties“.

I personally think this was unnecessarily alarmist, but at any rate, it is clear that the model of granting ongoing access to your location (until / unless you revoke it) worries some people.

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Fire Eagle Guest Pass

Sunday, May 10th, 2009

Imagine you are in a town or city. Perhaps one which you are unfamiliar with.

You’ve arranged to meet someone, and want to help them find you.

They’re not a close friend or family member, so you don’t want to sign up with something like Google Latitude which feels like quite a long-term thing for people who want to always be able to see where you are.

You don’t want to have to ask them to sign up for some new service like Fire Eagle just to find you.

Maybe they’re a client coming to meet you for a meeting. You want to help them find you, but you’re not sure that you want them to be able to see where you go after the meeting, or what pub you go to that evening.

This is the sort of thing that “Fire Eagle Guest Pass” – my hack entry for Open Hack London 2009 – was written for.

I’ve put together a few pictures to explain what it does on slideshare. They’re not exactly fine art, but hopefully they explain the idea 🙂

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