LBS and Privacy

For years, mobile companies have been dreaming of LBS (location-based services) as the next big money-maker for their industry. Because more cell phones nowadays have location services like GPS, the advertising utopia is that companies can market to you based on where you are at that time.

For example, if your iPhone says you're around the corner from a Starbucks (then again, in New York, when are you not?), Starbucks could send you a targeted ad or an opt-in text message to try their new mochafrappachini. Side note- In case you couldn't tell, I'm not a coffee drinker. Or, you could "check in" at a restaurant via Gowalla and receive an offer for a free dessert from that eatery. In theory, this may seem great, especially for the advertisers trying to reach you ... and I do mean YOU ... right where you are, when you are there. However, this brings up a whole slew of potential privacy and safety concerns.

Let's say you've checked via FourSquare at a bar in the city. All of your FourSquare friends -- and the entire world if you Tweeted this check-in -- now knows where you are and when you checked in there. Someone could then check your real name and location on your Twitter profile and do some not-so-involved digging on whitepages.com to discover your home address. They could then Google map the driving time between the bar and your house, say, 45 minutes. That would then give them a good 30 minutes to burglarize your home and possibly, God forbid, harm your family. There's even a tongue-in-cheek Web site that tracks this.

Anecdotally, I've heard a lot of women are not using FourSquare or Gowalla check-ins for this very creepy reason. Also, this is probably because women are smarter. This is still the early stages of widely-adopted LBS, so the issue won't seem dire until someone is hurt, or worse. Point being, it's one thing when we wax lyrical about the virtues of technology, but too often, technology is two steps ahead of common sense (see H-bomb, Toyota brakes, and the Epilady).

Take care with what you reveal about yourself in such a public forum. You wouldn't be this cavalier leaving this information lying around on a piece of paper. Why do it on the Internet?