Mapufacture’s take on Privacy about your current location is to stuff. Show what you want to show to who you want to show it to. Similar take to Fireeagle. Their take is to provide the user with the flexibility by providing a UI which lets the user choose what applications can do with their location.

We have such a large data footprint in this world. Many organisations have immense data about us. Hence, a question worth asking is do we really care about telling people where you are?

Fireeagle uses OAuth to control privacy around your location.

Seth putting publicaly share logging tool that you control. Control your location sharing at device level, service level, location level.

The privacy worry really stifles our industry and its creativity around building location ware applications. Dopplr is a prime example of this effect. People not only dont trust other people but also the government. There is a big anti government and self protection thing amongst the crowd.

One thing to remember tho is that the next gen folk, the real digital age, do not really care about all this. So is our argument around privacy dated. We are part of the public, even tho not part of GenNext, we should tackle this issue as a we and not a us vs them.

Nathan Eagle’s relationship mining – ContextAware – mobile users don’t really have opt-out, carriers already storing this information. Regulatory frameworks already exist in some countries around this information.

What is the social good vs social bad balance ? UK has many thousands of CCTV cameras. Technology for face recognition in videos is already existing. So where’s privacy ?

Impact of relationships with privacy is inferral due to proximity. Is it about explicit approval or disapproval? This is definitely a hard problem and a very hard social problem. As the definition of privacy is not only different across cities and states, but also across countries and religious cultures.

Does Geo Data Privacy really matter. Are we kidding ourselves by thinking we can protect data about ourselves. Don’t we need location tracking and sharing for our industry to prosper. Its like saying shopping malls can’t track what I do when I enter a mall, when I buy things using a credit card they should not do consumer behavior modeling, spending patterns etc are all used to provide consumers a better shopping experience.

We as GeoApplication builders need sharing and tracking to really build location aware applications. If people start faking where they are then the information we can deliver to them is also going to be fake.