Robin WiltonTake a moment to think about the way you use the internet… Which characteristic of it is more important to you, as a consumer: the ability to access resources anywhere, from anywhere, or the ability to find out what services are physically in your immediate vicinity? I’d be willing to bet that it’s the former.
Put another way, if you had to choose between a ubiquitous internet which gives you global, virtual access and an internet which tells you everything about what is physically nearest to you, would you honestly prefer the latter?
In fact, when I have used geo-location myself, the useful aspect has not been that I can physically locate a restaurant when I’m near it, but that I can physically locate it from wherever I happen to be.
So, if geolocation isn’t really for my benefit, why do my devices and online services increasingly assume that it is, and enable it by default?
[This micro-rant is, of course, my own personal opinion, should in no way be construed as the view or policy of my employer, and does not reflect any research or factual findings whatsoever...] But seriously… why should we put up with being tracked everywhere and told it’s for our benefit…? I’m just askin’…
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1 response so far ↓
1 Stephen Wilson October 28, 2011 at 4:00 pm
Good question Robin. Geolocation is another example of the unfair bargain at the heart of most social networking. Broadcasting where you’re at is kinda cool and fun (for some) but the return to the user is as nothing compared to the value of the intelligence it yields for the operator. Coupled with Facial Recognition, geolocation enables OSNs to know what you’re doing, when and where, and with whom (and you don’t even need to consciously check in anymore when location services are on by default, and GPS coords are embedded into the photos that others have taken of you).
If governments were logging this information without consent and without telling us what they planned to do with the data, there would be riots.