The Yahoo! Geo Technologies Blog

Thursday March 19th and Yahoo! Geo Technologies was represented at the latest mashup* event in London with this event’s meme being on the topic of “Being Location Aware”. The venue was ad agency Olgivy’s new Media Lab in the heart of Canary Wharf in London’s docklands, an impressive setting with an amazing view towards the City of London as the sun set.

First to speak was AGI Geocommunity conference chair and strategic consultant Steven Feldman who talked on Location-based Social Networking: Opportunity or Blind Alley. Steven gave a pointed but amusing summary of the location market and how he feels we have effectively lost the right to location privacy, predicting a high profile divorce within the next 2 years due to a celebrity neglecting to hide their location via their GPS enabled smartphone.

Next was Alex Housley, founder of Total Hotspots, who asked the audience Are We Nearly There Yet?. Alex gave a overview of the growth of Location Based Services since 2004 and looked at how a trust based model can help give relevance to a proliferation of data streams and sources.

Continuing the pace, the next speaker was Google’s Geospatial Technologist, Ed Parsons. Ed, fresh from the day’s media blitz on Google Streetview, spoke eloquently and without an accompanying deck on how users will, over time, move to develop an understanding on what sharing information, such as their location, will mean in terms of benefits when weighed against the potential cost of privacy loss.

I was the last speaker of the night and gave a, 5 minute talk (thanks to Tony), on a topic that both Ed and Alex had touched on, that of location privacy, entitled Location Privacy, Where I Am and Why It’s OK to Lie About That. I argued that we are socially conditioned to expect and to accept a lack of privacy and that to gain our own privacy in areas which matter to us we have to manage a complex series of opt out procedures; whereas your location stream should have a default model of opt in. I also touched on a series of questions an individual should ask of themselves and of a location service before revealing one’s location.

Throughout the evening, insight, analysis and commentary on the themes and topics that each speaker raised was given by Dr. Daniel Arthur of International Policy Dynamics and by Tony. All the panelists, myself included, could easily have spoken on our chosen topics for more than the traditional 5 minutes that a mashup* event permits but fair and timely commentary from chair Tony Fish ensured we all stuck to our alloted slot, give or take a spare second and allowed ample time for discussions with the engaged and knowledgeable audience, with realtime commentary from the connected members of the audience displayed on the screen behind us via Twitterfall, which is archived on this Twitter search.

There’s other commentary on the event on the blogs of Ed Parsons, Alex Housley and Steven Feldman.

Gary Gale, Head of UK Engineering, Yahoo! Geo Technologies

Photo credit: Robert Jones from Bluefire Consultancy on Flickr.