A very enjoyable evening at Mashup Events Being Location Aware talking with a very knowledgable panel and audience.
My slide on Google prompted a laugh particularly when some crafty person re-used it while Ed Parsons was talking without his own slides.
Privacy prompted a lot of discussion and some passion including the view that the age of privacy was just about over.
I think that there is a cumulative effect each time we disclose another detail about ourselves, add a location history or trail to our posts in Facebook, Twitter etc, leave all sorts of browsing information with Google and others and potentially have some of this forwarded onto others without our knowledge. Not many people realise the extent to which these fragments of information can be mashed together to create a detailed picture about us. Of course we are going to make our location available to services that offer us some benefit but there is a need for education so that users understand what they are doing when they say yes to the question “Use your current location?” Yahoo’s Fire Eagle is a good start at enabling people to manage different levels of location granularity and privacy accross different applications. I should have asked how many people are using it?
My prediction: Within 2 years there will be a celebrity divorce because someone has been “playing away from home” and has neglected to switch off the location features in their ultra hip phone
The slides are here:
