Mashup* Being Location Aware took place last Thursday at Ogilvy UK in Canary Wharf. I had the pleasure of sitting on an experienced panel of GIS experts, and spoke about my perspective on location-based services. The debate was moderated by Tony Fish and further insights and analysis were offered by Dr Daniel Arthur of International Policy Dynamics.

My positive subjective view on the location-based market opportunity were backed up some research stats in Gary Gale’s presentation:

“The (User Location Market) … will nearly triple in revenue this year, to $1.3 billion from $485 million in 2007, and will reach $8 billion in 2011.” – Gartner Research

Here’s a slidecast of my talk (note that this post continues below):Being Location Aware

I sacrificed my slides about privacy to stay within the 5 minute slot, to avoid friendly fire a friendly reminder from Tony Fish. However location privacy emerged as one of the main topics of the evening.

Steven Feldman raised some valid concerns about the current lack of consumer awareness regarding location privacy, and the possible implications of openly geo-tagging data. For example, a geo-tagged photo of your neighbours new Ferrari is posted online and a few days later it vanishes. Will there be a high-profile divorce case based upon evidence obtained from a locaton-aware service? (Maybe location isn’t the real problem in the latter?)

There is now an immense potential to openly share information, and it might not be immediately obvious why and how to be selective about the level of information to share openly. Among the benefits of sharing “private” location information are more dynamic social and contextually relevant services.

Sharing doesn’t always occur across completely open channels. Here are some ways in which location privacy is/should be managed:

• Gary Gale and Ed Parsons explained that Yahoo! Fire Eagle and Google Latitude both work on an opt-in basis. In other words, by default your location isn’t shared with everyone. Most traditional holders of private information instead require you to opt-out.
• Granular privacy controls should be easy to use and tightly integrated with leading location provider services. Per application, this should include:
  • who – which groups or individuals (similar to Facebook friend groups).
  • location accuracy – exact location, current town/city or hide location.
  • time – colleagues can find you within working hours, but not on evenings and weekends.
• Information about places you’ve been is usually less sensitive than your current location. A location “trail” is however quite sensitive, but could be the key to more contextually relevant services and hyper-local advertising.
• Rummble CEO, Andrew Scott, pointed out that the location-based service industry should avoid fuelling (often inaccurate) tabloid horror stories by continuing to develop a solid privacy foundation while focusing upon the benefits of sharing information with location-aware services and how to use them effectively.

Thanks to the entire mashup* team including Tony Fish, Simon Grice, Emma Jell; and to Robert Jones from Bluefire Consultancy for taking photos of the event.

The event has also been blogged by Gary Gale, Ed Parsons, Steven Feldman and mashup* event.

And finally, here’s Mr T’s view on mobile (unfortunately embedded video isn’t yet supported by SlideShare):