Location-based services, privacy, loss and exposure
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.
tags: App Store, Apple, biology, class, consumers, culture, data protection, Google Maps, GPS, human beings, iPhone 3G, location-based services, morality, privacy, public, respect, sat-navs, sexual liberation, values, Yahoo!
