Legal Commentary

Location awareness - the good, the bad, and the disturbing

By David Canton

Wired magazine has an article written about a man’s experiment with a location aware lifestyle.  He used an iPhone and various applications to see what would happen when location aware tools were used.  He used them to find things, to feed his location into social networking sites, and to see what info he could find about others.

Some of it was interesting and useful, but there was also a stalkerish aspect to it.  The potential consequences, for example, of others being able to follow your every move and know where you are (and just as important, where you aren’t).  And how much information he was able to find quickly about a random woman he noticed taking photos with her iPhone.

That aspect of it caught the attention of the Canadian Privacy Commissioner, who referred to the article in her blog.

Full post as published by eLegal Canton on January 27, 2009 (boomark / email).