The systems discusssed above have the potential to strip away locational privacy from individuals, making it possible for others to ask (and answer) the following sorts of questions by consulting the location databases:

• Did you go to an anti-war rally on Tuesday?
• A small meeting to plan the rally the week before?
• At the house of one “Bob Jackson”?
• Did you walk into an abortion clinic?
• Did you see an AIDS counselor?
• Have you been checking into a motel at lunchtimes?
• Why was your secretary with you?

This article on “Locational Privacy” does a terrific job of laying out the potential uses and abuses of computer systems tracking where you have been. It also suggests solutions, but it does less of a good job explaining the complex cryptography that could alleviate many people’s concerns.

We need more of this kind of work, so I’m doing my little bit to publicize it. I hope it reaches the ears of legislators, or at least their staff. And I also hope our governments recognize the need to pay attention to these issues and handle them the right way.

There’s a big societal worry, in general, about the safety and privacy of personal information in the Internet age. In some cases, like banking and medical records, that worry is well-founded. But for the most part, people should just act like they and their data are in public, and exposed. That should usually be OK, because the benefits outweigh the costs, or as Tom Yager recently put it:

You can’t live in a cloud and expect the safety and isolation of an underground bunker. Information that I care to keep secret travels by Federal Express or is accompanied by a handshake. I take for granted that my electronic correspondence, including phone calls, is up for grabs, so the sum of my nonsecrets is not that interesting.

In this post, Tim O’Reilly talks about Vic Gundotra showing him the mobile device light:

Vic said that he realized in that moment that the era of the PC was over, and that the future belonged to cloud applications accessed via phones…I think about the web as experienced on a PC, and then about mobile as an add on. The tipping point has come; that notion has to flip: if we’re trying to get ahead of the curve, we need to think first about the phone, and then think about the PC browser experience as the add-on.

This paradigm shift has so many important implications it’s hard to know where to start. The first thing that comes to mind for me, working in the geospatial industry, is that the map browsing application as a primary user interface to geo-data and geo-analysis will continue to fade into history.

But conversely, use of geo-data and geo-analysis on servers should increase as applications try to do more to give users the right answer with fewer key strokes and fewer round trips to the server. For example, if you search for restaurants in a mobile app like Yelp, maybe it should take into account not only where you are at the given moment, but how far you travelled in the past to find a good meal. And maybe it should even take into account your current speed to know whether you’re driving or walking. And why not also consider the time of day to determine whether you want lunch or dinner? And whether rush hour traffic will be too bad to go very far?

This kind of mobile optimization combining UI factors, personal location and activity, and server-side smarts is another important implication for the paradigm shift to mobile devices.