Interesting People mailing list archives
Re: Palm Pre [openly and brazenly] reporting GPS locations, app usage to Palm?
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 2009 09:52:16 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: Seth David Schoen <schoen () loyalty org> Date: August 13, 2009 1:50:14 PM EDT To: David Farber <dave () farber net> Cc: ip <ip () v2 listbox com>Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Palm Pre [openly and brazenly] reporting GPS locations, app usage to Palm?
David Farber writes:
From: "Richard Bennett" <richard () bennett com> The current thinking on privacy in the US Congress isn't troubled by this, as it permits collection of personal information that's essential to providing a service. Obviously, location information is the enabler of "location based services," just as information about your bank balance is vital to operating a cash dispenser. The most obvious place to get location information is from the tower o which your device is currently associated, and there's no triangulation needed. Fine-grained location comes from the GPS, just as it does when you're using a turn-by-turn navigation system.
I think Ethan Ackerman was concerned that triangulation might require the _assistance of_ a carrier. Carriers can certainly perform triangulation to find the location of a particular device, but so can the devices themselves. I still remember the Ricochet modems having a Hayes-style AT command which would output latitude/longitude pairs for all the base stations within range. Although they didn't provide signal strength, you could average them to get a pretty good estimate of location, particularly since they were numerous and their range was pretty small. The carrier, I expect, didn't know when or how often you did this, or from where, or for what purpose.
There are a lot of interesting issues around privacy, but this isn't one.
Well, above you referred to "personal information that's essential to providing a service" and said that "location information is the enabler" of these services. In a certain sense, there's a lot of wiggle room inside of "essential" and "enabler". Indeed, EFF, where I work, just published a white paper about privacy and location-based services: http://www.eff.org/wp/locational-privacy This paper points out that there are implementation options for many of these services that don't require collecting as much information as the naive implementation strategy would. And I've talked to several location-based service implementers about this problem. Apart from the cryptographic techniques mentioned in this whitepaper, there's often a continuum where a service provider can know less detail about user locations in exchange for increased storage, processing, and network requirements on the mobile device. For example, for a mapping application, one extreme might be Google Maps, where an application gives a rather precise latitude and longitude to Google and requests map tiles surrounding that location. (I know you can also use Google Maps to look up other locations, so I'm just talking about the case where you want your device to show a map of where you are right now.) Another extreme is a dedicated GPS device which is sold already containing a street map atlas for a wide area, and which doesn't need to interactively communicate with a network at all. The GPS device vendor, or the electronic road atlas distributor, may know that you are likely to use the device in a certain area but has no particular knowledge of your movements. It should also be obvious that there are a lot of possibilities in between -- where a device requests mapping data for a certain area (a neighborhood? a city?) and then caches it for a long time, using it to render maps of the local area without giving any position updates to a service provider. -- Seth David Schoen <schoen () loyalty org> | Qué empresa fácil no pensar en http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/ | un tigre, reflexioné. http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/ | -- Borges, El Zahir ------------------------------------------- Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Current thread:
- Re: Palm Pre [openly and brazenly] reporting GPS locations, app usage to Palm? David Farber (Aug 12)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Palm Pre [openly and brazenly] reporting GPS locations, app usage to Palm? David Farber (Aug 13)
- Re: Palm Pre [openly and brazenly] reporting GPS locations, app usage to Palm? Dave Farber (Aug 14)
- Re: Palm Pre [openly and brazenly] reporting GPS locations, app usage to Palm? David Farber (Aug 15)