Saturday, February 10. 2007

Consumer LBS and Transparency

There is a debate going on within the consumer LBS community regarding privacy and transparency. In particular, if a consumer service allows one party access to the location of a second party, should that second party be notified when this location information has been provided? This could be done via SMS, or potentially some visual cue on the second parties mobile device. In principle, such a practice avoids turning safety and social applications into "stalking" services.

In 2005, South Korea, a leading market for LBS services, made this type of notification a legal requirement for consumer LBS services, although the notification mechanism was not made clear. The three major carriers in South Korea have possibly been acting in violation of this law, see article for more details. Joe Francica, Editor-in-Chief of this blog, has written previously about this arcticle here.

For the U.S. market, the CTIA LBS Working Group is addressing these kinds of questions, and will likely be making recommendations for U.S. carriers and service providers. A weaker version of the S. Korea law, the so called Location Privacy Protection Act was enacted by Congress in 2001. This law requires simply that subscribers opt into services that involve the sharing of location data.

Posted by Scott Hotes in LBS at 23:03 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

No comments

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to	[ Top level ]
Comment	Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_. Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above:
	Remember Information?   Subscribe to this entry