24 October 2005

Location services

Though this is more toward information policy than telecom policy, I was reminded by this article in BusinessWeek of something I had written earlier (in comments) regarding this article:

"This is interesting, thanks for posting it. In areas where traffic density is very low, even anonymity as promised by Missouri would be of much help. A reasonable observer would be able to deduce who is going somewhere if there are only a few residences on a street ...

"On the other hand one could make the case that this is not an unreasonable privacy loss for a public good (basically, echoing Scott McNealy -CEO of Sun- who said something like "You have no privacy anymore. Get over it"). Furthermore, users can always turn their phone off, which would prevent them from being tracked ...

What I would like to point out from the BusinessWeek article is that different cultural values may make a service tenable in one country (or even region) than in another. Can you think of other instances where this has occurred? And where it hasn't? In each case, what were the features that made a technology or service transferrable (or not)?

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1 comment:

Martin Weiss said...

Here is a location service based on a Google maps mashup ... I wonder how they dealt with opt-in issues?