Location-Based Services: Hype or Hope?
To date, location-based services are widely used in emergency services, help alerts, fleet tracking and offering the location of a mobile phone. Or, as Wikipedia lists them,
Some examples of location-based services are:
Requesting the nearest business or service, such as an ATM or restaurant
Receiving alerts, such as notification of a sale on gas or warning of a traffic jam
Finding a buddy
For the carrier, location-based services provide value add by enabling services such as:
Resource tracking with dynamic distribution Taxis, service people, rental equipment, doctors, fleet scheduling
Resource tracking Objects without privacy controls, using passive sensors or RF tags, such as packages and train boxcars
Finding someone or something Person by skill (doctor), business directory, navigation, weather, traffic, room schedules, stolen phone, emergency 911
Proximity-based notification (push or pull) Targeted advertising, buddy list, common profile matching (dating), automatic airport check-in
Proximity-based actuation (push or pull) Payment based upon proximity (EZ pass, toll watch)
All very useful services, but in a sector where much more was expected, it looks kind of vanilla these days.
In September of 2006, Silicon.com wrote of location-based services, “Another good question. Mobile operators, pundits and other assorted industry watchers have been talking about LBS since the tail end of the last decade but have never really found a way to capitalise on them. It’s thought that the inclusion of GPS in mobile handsets could jump-start LBS. ABI Research predicts that by 2011, there will be 315 million GPS subscribers for location based services, up from a measly 12 million this year.”
A year later, has anything changed?
In May of this year, the BBC was showing interest: “Speaking at the FT Mobile Media conference, the BBC’s director of future media, Ashley Highfield, said the broadcaster - now the UK’s favourite mobile web destination - believes mobile content is shortly to enter a boom time. He said: “Mobile is the future of media and technology… I think a number of factors are coming into alignment for explosive growth.” Among those factors, Highfield believes, are better pricing, operators’ decision to ditch their ‘walled garden’ approach to content and improvements in phones themselves including the addition of GPS. Highfield added: “It looks like the shift we saw when broadband took off.”
One major use of location-based services will be in telecare for the disabled and elderly. In March of 2007, the International Journal of Health Geographics published an editorial about CAALYX, a “Complete Ambient Assisted Living Experiment, an EU-funded project that aims at increasing older people’s autonomy and self-confidence by developing a wearable light device capable of measuring specific vital signs of the elderly, detecting falls and location, and communicating automatically in real-time with his/her care provider in case of an emergency, wherever the older person happens to be, at home or outside.”
“CAALYX aims at increasing older people’s autonomy and self-confidence by developing a wearable light device capable of measuring specific vital signs of the elderly, detecting falls, and communicating automatically in real time with his/her care provider in case of an emergency, wherever the elderly person happens to be, at home or outside. Specifically, CAALYX’s objectives are:
• To identify which vital signs and patterns are most important in determining probable critical states of an elder’s health;
• To develop an electronic device able to measure vital signs and to detect falls of the older person in the domestic environment and outside. This gadget will have a geo-location system so that the monitoring system may be able to know the elder’s position in case of emergency (especially outdoors);
• To allow for the secure monitoring of individuals organised into groups managed by a caretaker who will decide whether to communicate events identified by the system to the emergency service (112); and
• To create social tele-assistance services that can be easily operated by the users.”
Crucially for Blindside readers, CAALYX addresses privacy issues in the editorial: “Location capability poses service providers with the challenge of responsibly handling consumers’ personal privacy [1]. This is particularly important with ‘tracking services’ that continuously monitor and log user’s location, like Wherifone, an American location-tracking service for the elderly and children [21], and other live tracking services using technologies like the GpsGate Server [22]. Such services raise many privacy concerns and questions; for example, “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?”[23]
However, CAALYX’s approach to location information privacy is different. CAALYX is an extensible user health monitoring platform that uses GPS as to support that function (health monitoring) and for emergency handling. Thus CAALYX is not continuously tracking older people, or continuously communicating their location in real-time with the central monitoring station. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, allowing the data logger (a mobile smartphone that users carry on them) to collect the data rather than continuously stream it to a remote server means that expensive bandwidth is saved. It is also far more power-efficient than a system that has to continuously transmit data and pick up real-time geographic information via GPS, a paramount feature in any handheld device. But most importantly, it means people will not feel as if their every move is being watched. Location information is only sent when required during an emergency or when an alarm is raised. As such CAALYX has the potential of setting the standards and providing a ‘modus operandi’ or ‘best-practice’ model for wireless location privacy in mobile, location-intelligent/enabled e-health services.”
Commercial activity reported in the media indicates substantial interest in location-based services. Nokia’s recent purchase of Navteq, a supplier of digital maps, follows their recent introduction of a GPS-enabled mobile phone, the 6110 Navigator. “Using the handset’s embedded software, consumers can view their current location on a map, search for destinations, find specific routes, or locate nearby services, such as restaurants, hotels or shops. Location-based services are “one of the cornerstones of Nokia’s internet services strategy,” Nokia chief executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said in a statement. “By joining forces with Navteq, we will be able to bring context and geographical information to a number of our internet services with accelerated time to market.”
And from the same article, “Navteq has been viewed as a takeover target since this summer, when navigation device maker TomTom said it would pay €1.8bn for Navteq’s top rival in the mapping market, Tele Atlas. Tele Atlas provides maps for MapQuest, Google Maps and several other navigation devices. TomTom accounts for about 40 percent of Tele Atlas’ business. When the acquisition was announced in July, many speculated that Google would buy rival Navteq.”
It’s all very much jam tomorrow, but tomorrow looks closer than it did a year ago. Well, I suppose it would.
To see what’s actually happening today, one needs to look at Asia. A white paper found on ZDNet (registration required), titled ‘Home Network Services in Korea,’ and published by Research On Asia (ROA) Group, Inc. talks about some interesting location-based services:
Logicplant’s Telekeeper (Mobile phone-based PC remote service) Service in brief: a solution to problems related to children’s PC use. The parents can monitor their children’s computer use.
Phone CCTV Service by SKT: Service in brief: this service, based on camera and high speed Internet, enables the user to monitor the situation at home via mobile phone and warns the user by sending a text message in a case of an intruder. By just installing a camera at home or in office, the service is enabled in real time via mobile phone.
Nespot Lu Service by KT: Service in brief: KT’s wireless Nespot service, connects mobile phone with a home robot. The robot is equipped with a small camera that monitors the situation inside the house and enables the user to check each room while staying outside the house by using a mobile phone.
From America (specifically, the University of Colorado), comes “A Methodological Assessment of Location Privacy Risks
in Wireless Hotspot Networks,” another white paper found on ZDNet. The abstract states, “Mobile computing enables users to compute and communicate almost regardless of their current location. However, as a side effect this technology considerably increased surveillance potential for user movements. Current research addresses location privacy rather patchwork-like than comprehensively. Thus, this paper presents a methodology for identifying, assessing, and comparing location privacy risks in mobile computing technologies. In a case study, we apply the approach to IEEE 802.11b wireless LAN networks and location-based
services, where it reveals significant location privacy concerns through link- and application-layer information. From a technological perspective, we argue that these are best addressed through novel anonymity-based mechanisms.
Jam today, but not jam here.
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