No hiding place

Posted on 10 Nov 2009 at 12:53

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Your mobile phone and PC can reveal your exact location to all manner of firms and organisations. Stewart Mitchell looks at the benefits and the threats of geolocation.

They know where you are. Not a trailer for a bad horror flick, but an increasingly likely truism for the digital age. Your mobile phone and computer can reveal your whereabouts, and various organisations and authorities are very interested in finding it out.

Geolocation is potentially extremely useful. It's the technology that means that when you go to google.com from any computer in Britain, you're automatically taken to google.co.uk and have the option to search UK-based websites only. Hop across the Channel and the search results will focus on pages in French and about France. With improved geolocation facilities built into Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox browsers, the services that can help you find your place in the world are invaluable for mapping and social-networking applications.

The more connected we become, the more accurately our position can be triangulated. Mobile phone cell information, GPS signals and WiFi hotspots - even RFID tags built into security cards - are used to pinpoint us to within a few metres. It's a dream for people marketing local restaurants or taxi services, but a nightmare for anyone who fears the long arm of Big Brother.

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Consumer services

Whether it's a smartphone's GPS or a wireless laptop, geolocation systems have come on in leaps and bounds recently, sometimes pinning people down to within a few metres.

"In the UK we have about 75 per cent of the country mapped, and London is one of the best cities in the world for accuracy," says Ted Morgan, managing director of location provider Skyhook. "In London, for example, it's accurate to about 20-30 metres."

Skyhook is one of a number of companies providing business-to-business geolocation services for commercial websites and mobile applications. It's easy for any website to see the IP addresses of its visitors, but companies such as Skyhook are able to convert this IP address into a geographic location. For mobile devices such as netbooks and mobile phones, Skyhook employs a combination of techniques to pinpoint people's position, such as by looking at which WiFi networks are in range and comparing it to the company's database.

Many websites that use geolocation do so to bring its users more relevant information. Say you were looking for a local laptop repair shop. A website will ask you to share your location so that only businesses within a few miles show up in results, possibly with mapped directions.

The potential uses for this information are huge. "The iPhone App Store has added 3,000 location-based apps in just over a year," says Morgan. "You can get fitness apps that show how far you have run, a service that calls up a taxi based on your location, and with social networking you can see where you friends are - if they have it switched on, they show up on a map. We've put together services so you can see the local weather, events near you, Flickr images taken nearby, jobs in the area and property for sale... there will be potential for advertising."

Continental Airlines' website changes like a chameleon, depending on where you are. It uses geolocation to decide which version of the site you will see; there are 60 different versions in eight languages. Destinations and prices are all dependent on where you are.