No hiding place

Posted on 10 Nov 2009 at 12:53

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Gallery

Friends on Fire is typical of the way in which social networks dream of using geolocation details. Published by the Fire Eagle team at Yahoo!, the service marries geolocation information with Facebook information, meaning people can see their friends appear on a map if they have signed up too. Friends on fire uses Fire Eagle's conservative privacy policy, which is commendable. You can set the software to show your exact location or to show your country, region or town, and choose which of your friends can see you. However, once given permission to publish your location, it will continue to do so until you remember to switch the service off.

Services such as this, which are also expected to appear on Twitter soon, can be more than a gimmick. Imagine how many times a friend has been in the pub next door and you never knew. This is social networking crossing the boundaries between the internet and the real world, which is the space in which it becomes most useful.

However, while many of these tracking services are for the benefit of consumers, it's the marketing men that could be the real beneficiaries. The first wave of geolocation arrived with much ballyhoo when mobile phone location became an affordable add-on to handsets around seven years ago. The marketing men became feverishly excited, overcome with the possibilities of selling restaurants, music or cinema tickets as consumers came within range of retailers. Critics claim this just opens up a new wave of corporate intrusion.

"I don't see these as being of any advantage to the general customer," says Ian Angel, a professor of information systems at the London School of Economics. "This is just another way for businesses and other commercial operators to get at us. We've had it with cold calling and spam, and now that spam will be following us wherever we are, trying to make us go into a shop.

"If I was bombarded with messages as I was entering a record store or anything else, I'd turn around and walk out again."

The Bad
Consumer & citizen control

The companies that are employing geolocation for new software services are only half the story. These are the friendly faces of geolocation, but they have some bully-boy cousins that use the same information to exert control.

Accurate location is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, users will want the most precise location possible if they are trying to cyber-hail a taxi or if they're using Google's Location in conjunction with maps as an impromptu satnav. On the other hand, if they're being located through their company-supplied mobile phone, they might hope for a fuzzier geo-placement that won't define whether they are in a client's office or the pub next door.

The bad news is that much of the activity currently utilising the ability to pinpoint consumers is detrimental to the average man on the street. Go to the BBC iPlayer while abroad, request to download last night's edition of Top Gear and - even if you're a licence payer - you will be politely declined. The service is available only to UK residents.

"It really winds me up, because I travel a lot with work," says Gillian Proctor, a fashion buyer from Yorkshire. "I'd really like to watch the news and EastEnders while I'm away if I'm missing home, and I should be able to because I have already paid for the service, but just because I'm overseas it won't let me."

Movie download sites use the same sort of restrictions to enforce regional distribution models. Online gambling sites also use these restrictions to block access to comply with laws in jurisdictions where online gambling is banned.