LBS facility a two-edged sword

If truth be told, in the last 15 years I have been to Bandung about 10 times at most.
Not surprisingly, the streets there are almost as unfamiliar to me as Nietzsche's writings.
The last time my family and I were there, we got caught in a gridlock near the train station. We were hungry. As we looked left and right for a good place for lunch Pak Dani, my driver, told me that we were already low on fuel.
On a 3,000cc Ford Escape, this was bad news. We had to find a gas station quickly -- but first, a place to fill our stomach.
Then we saw the Ampera restaurant on our right. We pulled over, parked and went in. We were very happy. They served good food -- hot fried chicken, fish and tofu, a lot of fresh vegetables and rice wrapped in banana leaves. And the prices were good enough to attract us back there for dinner before heading back to Jakarta.
As for the gas station, we asked the parking attendant where the nearest one was. We were lucky to have found this modest restaurant as we had gotten lost in Bandung's notorious traffic.
However, wouldn't it have been nice if we could have accessed the information about this great, but reasonably priced Sundanese restaurant on my cell phone?
Services such as these have been available for quite some time. They are known as Location-Based Services (LBS). Here, XL, the GSM cell phone operator, was the first to offer it to its subscribers.
Based on information collected from base stations, the operator will know where you are located at any particular time, and if you subscribe to the service they will feed you with information relevant only in the area -- or zone -- where you are.
If you were in Mangga Dua, North Jakarta, for example, they would not send you information about sales at Pondok Indah Mall II, South Jakarta.
However, LBS is more than just pushing or pulling the information that you need, based on your current position and the time of day: It can be a life-saving tool, too.
In the U.S., cell phone operators are required to be able to inform the police the exact location of a person who makes a 911 emergency call so that they can immediately go there to help.
Where are you?
LBS works using interacting different technologies. One of them is, of course, satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS). A lot of mobile devices are equipped to receive radio signals from the 24 GPS satellites that have been placed into orbit by the U.S. government.
The only problem is if the user is in the basement of a building. He will lose the connection to the satellite as the signals get blocked. In case you are interested in this technology, Garmin (www.garmin.com) is one of the leading GPS device and solution makers in the world.
Those of you who happened to read my report on Japan's CDMA operator KDDI three years ago would also know that a subscriber's location can also be determined by triangulating the signals from cell towers.
In fact, this method could be very accurate -- to within a meter -- and it can still work inside a building. If you find yourself in a sea of people inside a Tokyo subway station during peak hours, you can use LBS to quickly find your friend, thanks to the interaction between your mobile device and hers.
Now that we have all sorts of sensors around us and radio frequency identity (RFID) chips in a lot of things that we carry, it has become even easier to track ourselves down.
Depending on the seriousness of their crimes, convicted felons now no longer have to be kept in overcrowded jails, as the authority can keep track of their movements because they wear RFID tags.
An LBS has just been installed on the Stockholm subway using Cisco Systems' Unified Wireless Network and software from Appear Networks.
Using Wi-Fi access points available down in the underground tunnel, the service offers a lot of things. People can be tracked down even as they travel on the subway. As their identity is known, information can be fed into their device, including daily messages from their bosses.
In the past, subway security personnel would have to verbally call for backup in the case of an emergency; this distracting communication could put their own lives in danger.
With LBS, all they have to do is press a button on their mobile device and the command center will immediately know where the alert comes from. Their supervisors can use closed-circuit monitors to check the situation while other security personnel in the proximity can be called to give assistance.
A similar service is also being tested in Kista Galleria, a high-tech shopping mall in Sweden's "Silicon Valley" where Ericsson's employees go for lunch or hang around after work.
The LBS solution is also provided by the combination of Cisco 2700 Series Wireless Location Appliance and Appear Networks' Appear IQ software. Have you ever found yourself walking up and down the floors of a mall in Singapore or Hong Kong to find the entrance to the MRT station?
While it is great exercise, in Kista Galleria you can save your legs by using this indoor, Wi-Fi-based LBS to quickly find the entrance to the subway station.
Inside the mall, too, a patron can view movie trailers before heading to one of the 11 studios. She could also check out the menus available at the 20 restaurants in the food court. The service provides so much information that is relevant only to visitors in the mall.
LBS can also be used to filter calls. For example, when I'm at home, I can set my cell phone to automatically divert calls to my PSTN (fixed-line) phones.
This is a feature that I really want, as I have a very weak Telkomsel signal inside my home. With the LBS feature, the call diversion will automatically stop, the moment I step out of my house.
However, people also believe that LBS -- especially its tracking applications -- poses a dilemma.
While being able to locate quickly a truck stranded at the roadside due to engine failure, to enable the fleet owner to send assistance, bosses can also track down their workers and determine whether they are indeed in the warehouse or at a bowling alley instead.
You can no longer call your colleagues and say "I'm stuck on the toll road" while you are still sipping your coffee at home and they are waiting for you in the meeting room.
Well, I guess, the only way to keep one's privacy in situations such as this is simply to turn off your mobile device and blame it on a dead battery when your boss or colleagues question you about it!
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