For the past few weeks, the newswires have been buzzing with issues surrounding "location". First, federal prosecutors in New Jersey began looking into the types of location data that were being collected by mobile applications like Pandora and whether that violated the published Licensing Agreement. Then the story got bigger as it became known that both Apple and Google were routinely capturing location data (both GPS and Wi-Fi Hot Spots) and amassing mountains of data about their users' location patterns.
The ability to pull the location information from a cell phone has enormous potential--both good and bad. Unlike a landline phone, a mobile phone is typically used by only one person, and the phone stays with that person wherever they go. In short, if you know where the phone is, you know where the person is. If you know where a bunch of phones are, you can begin to draw some very useful conclusions.
The "Big Brother" potential here is frightening. We've more or less accepted the fact that electronic transactions in which we engage on a routine basis (including paying vehicle tolls through an electronic toll collection system like E-ZPass) create an indelible trail that results in vast amounts of personal data being collected. The ability to track your cell phone means the tracking can go on continuously and unavoidably. You can turn off the tracking capability in your phone, but that disables functions like mapping, which are a big part of why we wanted location capabilities in the first place.
These location technologies are technically challenging, as you can't simply slap a GPS receiver into a phone and call it a day (Glenn Fleishman did an excellent piece on location technologies for PC World). The time-to-first-fix (of your GPS location) can be several minutes, and the battery drain is enormous.
Hence the cellular carriers have gone to Assisted GPS, and the smartphone vendors are using a combination of that along with Wi-Fi reference points to ease the workload; both Apple and Google ran into trouble over that part. We also have location systems that work purely on Wi-Fi networks using trilateration from multiple access points.
Hopefully this will not turn into another case where the technology advances faster than the requirements for personal privacy. The trials that have been done claim that the data has been "anonymous," but we must be extremely careful if information like device IMEIs (International Mobile Equipment Identifier) are collected. While these hardware codes do not indentify the owner, we are getting awfully close. I would be all in favor of regulations that would entail jail time for executives in companies that even attempted to cross over the anonymity line.
The privacy issues are less intense in enterprise environments (assuming the tracking is disabled outside of working hours), and as a result, location holds the promise of countless applications on both the UC-U (UC for User Productivity) and UC-B (UC for Business Productivity) fronts. On the UC-U front, location-based presence is the most obvious application. Mitel recently announced that their UC Communicator Advanced for Android is capable of setting a user's presence status and calling preferences based on either GPS or Wi-Fi reference points (they previously had a GPS version of that capability for BlackBerry devices).
In the UC-B area, service dispatch and fleet tracking are already well-established location applications. Further, health care facilities routinely use Wi-Fi tracking to locate equipment with asset tags.
To see where this is going, a recent report in the Wall Street Journal described several leading edge ideas on location. This research is looking at tracking the movements of large numbers of people and drawing conclusions from both patterns and social interactions. In one example, a research team at AT&T culled through millions of anonymous call records from hundreds of thousands of mobile-phone subscribers in New York and Los Angeles to analyze commuting habits. Project leader Dr. Ramon Caceres wanted to gauge the potential for energy conservation and urban planning. Measuring the speed mobile devices are moving could also allow you to identify traffic congestion.
Nicholas Christakis at Harvard University is using phone data to study how diseases, behavior, and ideas spread through social networks. His work focuses on "social contagion", the idea that our relationships with people around us, which are readily mapped through cellphone usage, shape our behavior in unexpected ways. Through his research he has determined that obesity and loneliness are contagious. Government organizations can use these webs of relationships to influence health-care decisions.
This research is taking the idea of location to a whole new level by introducing the concepts of social networking. Marty Parker talks about identifying potential for UC applications by identifying "communications hot spots". I think we may be looking at a scientific way of doing just that in some business processes.
