Location-based services, privacy, loss and exposure

Thursday, August 14th, 2008

There’s a big hoohah right now over Yahoo!’s new offering of location-based services, yet precious little has been written or said about the second-generation iPhone 3G’s incorporation of a GPS chip that is used by a variety of applications you can buy or get for free from Apple’s App Store. Other mobile devices are playing catch-up, but it seems likely that over the next year personalised GPS services will explode in popularity, following on from the sat-navs that have, in a few short years, become must-have devices for all but the most technophobic—or, at least, technowary—vehicle drivers.

The new wave of location-based personalised services include directories that pinpoint where you are and send you details on local services, everything from cinemas to bookshops and areas of interest to tourists. You can send tweets to your Twitter account containing links that, when people click on them, show a map with a pin in it highlighting your precise location almost down to your front door (if you’re at home, that is). Photos snapped on everything from mobile phones to high-end professional DSLR cameras now routinely carry geographical data encoded into them.

The iPhone 3G even brings sat-nav to the pedestrian, in collusion with Google Maps, although personal experience leads me to advise you not to expect to be offered the quickest route from A to B—the Maps application on the iPhone 3G works, but it made me walk (I found out afterwards) several unnecessary miles. It wasn’t that there was a little-known esoteric shortcut. It just avoided the main high street altogether. Still, it got me where I wanted to be and walking is, for most of us, a good form of exercise.

Location-based services on handheld devices are going to be at least as popular as in-car sat-navs because they offer a much easier way to tag photos and find the places you’re looking for, compared to loading a search page and typing in, for example, ‘London’ ‘SE1′ ‘cinema’. But there are huge concerns over privacy.

As things stand right now in terms of the law, companies from large (Apple and Yahoo!) to small (even individual application developers) are accumulating information on where we are, and where we are going, and asking us to take them on trust with regard to how they store and use the data they glean from our GPS-enabled devices. Yet over time, location-based services allow for profiles to be built up in much the same way as credit scoring agencies build comprehensive snapshots of our consumer activities, and therefore our lives, based on our purchases.

It is perfectly legal, of course, though utterly repellent to many of us, for credit scoring agencies to know what newspapers we buy, whether we rent or have mortgages, what our jobs are, what cars we drive, and how much we get pad. But do any of us want to extend the types of companies that have access to this sort of information?

What’s needed urgently in many countries is new legislation dictating what companies can and can’t do with GPS-sourced information. In the UK we do have laws that govern data privacy, but our government has shown us, in relation to BT pushing ahead with the introduction of Phorm to spy on its customers’ online activities, that it really has no desire to stop big corporations from treating the law with utter contempt. Hopefully the fact that the EU has demanded the UK government provide information on the Phorm furore, by the end of August, may yet lead to our spineless and irredeemably tainted politicians being forced to act on the issue, and protect our privacy as the law actually already requires.

So far the protests of British citizens have been completely ignored, although anyone with a BT broadband contract is advised that, should Phorm go ahead, they can rightly claim a breach of contract and get out of their deals, switching to another ISP. Some individuals are even talking of taking BT to court for breaking the law. A small number of ISPs have declared themselves against Phorm, promising no spying on their customers’ web-browsing activities. In the absence of effective government that puts the people first, not businesses, it seems the old consumer power of voting with our feet is all we have at our disposal to help us defeat the arrogance of BT.

But when you consider that countless companies and individuals are now producing tracking applications that are being taken up by consumers at an incredible rate—millions of dollars were made by Apple’s App Store in its first few weeks—you realise that Pandora’s Box has been opened, and we can’t close it. More to the point, do we want to? Locator-based services are genuinely useful to us most of the time. What we want and need are new, tougher, laws to protect our privacy, and work done to ensure cooperation on an international level, so that, for example, if a UK iPhone owner downloads an application from the App Store, he or she knows that the developer based in the US would face jail time if found to be breaching UK law on data harvesting and usage. And vice versa.

This is, of course, highly unlikely to happen. We have enough clashes with the US over what data the EU is prepared to hand over on its citizens wanting to travel to the US, and we can’t as a species agree on effective measures to prevent global warming wiping us out. If the threat of an extinction-level event of our own making isn’t going to induce a cooperative spirit among nations, what chance the widespread adoption of personal GPS locator services being effectively tackled in order to protect people the world over?

So, what do we do? I don’t have the answer to that question. Do you? We can, one supposes, eschew the technologies of the 21st Century altogether, providing we can find a remote island to live on. But even the most desolate places can be seen from space. Is privacy a thing of the past? Most people are remarkably chilled about its passing if so. They don’t seem to mind what personal digitalised data gets out, with the proviso that nobody opens their letters and parcels, or uses their credit cards. Yet the same people would rightly baulk at the idea of opening their bedroom curtains, keeping the lights on, and providing passers-by with full access to what they do in bed, allowing strangers to determine their favourite sexual positions, how often they have sex, whether they snore or not, and so on.

An absurd comparison? No, not really—credit scoring agencies already keep note of your sexuality, though one has to wonder, if a man with a wife and two kids is classed as heterosexual, that is not guaranteed to be true, is it? He could be bisexual, or even gay and living a closet existence. More to the point, why are these companies allowed to label us on such intimate terms?

Perhaps the loss of privacy isn’t only down to advances in technology. Maybe it’s linked to the increased exposure of intimacy since the 1960s, for the entertainment of the masses. Without wanting to convey a sense of moral outrage I for one don’t feel, it is true to say that what, once upon a time, stayed in the bedroom, more or less, is now on radio, TV, in films, and on the Internet. As the song from the musical Chicago asks, whatever happened to class? And I don’t mean working class, upper class, middle class. I mean class as in style and integrity. Mostly integrity.

We feel more insecure than ever before now that it’s acceptable for the media to display perfect, youthful bodies time and time again. This lament for the loss of intimacy and class should not be misinterpreted by anyone as an attack on sexual liberation, for we can be sexually liberated and open-minded without taking our clothes off in public. We can be sexually liberated and hold onto concepts such as respect, privacy, and class. But many of us don’t. Trash rules. Does it have to be that way? Probably not. Open-minded is not the same as allowing one’s brain to atrophy. But yes, it does seem that for us to stand today, as we do, on the brink of watching privacy die a painful death, unloved and uncared for by many, that the loss of class, respect, and many of our once-cherished values had to come first.

And what happens in the brave new world to spirituality? We can be heard and witnessed in prayer and ritual, but our inner conversations with the gods (or, if you prefer, God) are private. As, for the time being, are our thoughts. But thoughts, and religious views, can be and are shaped by the world we inhabit. They are not isolated, and therefore the privacy of the inner self is a different thing to the privacy this article is mostly concerned with, which does require, in part, a degree of self-enforced isolation.

And, for most people in the West, God is dead, although lip service to the mainstream deity is as popular as ever. The void is filled or evaded with the transient need to possess stuff, and people, and the anaesthetising power of TV and films. It’s not, for anyone, a satisfactory swap. But governments like the change, as do businesses. Ironically, a lot of atheists—by no means all—worship a very old god, that being Mammon. He doesn’t demand prayer or ritual, or community. He just needs your money. As gods go, he’s a bit crap, really.

Could it be that we are gradually changing what it means to be a human being? What makes us human is a big question, but surely one of the things that defines what we are has to be the right to privacy. We have a need to be alone at times, to be isolated, to drop off the radar. It is biological as well as cultural. Culture can disappear overnight, but biology can’t be changed so easily without involving a laboratory and scientists willing to gamble on knowing more than nature about what works and what doesn’t. We change the wirings of our brains, the way we think, our values, while keeping our biology as it is at our peril.

I draw no fixed permanent conclusions from any of this. I would, however, very much appreciate hearing and reading the thoughts and theories of others. I will end, for now, with a quote from Yahoo! co-founder David Filo, who told the BBC: