Privacy Concerns in Location Based Apps

Guess where I am right now…

We’re working on location enabled applications.  Naturally, privacy has been on our minds.  In doing our research, my partner signed up for Google Latitude and invited me to share my location as an experiment.  She has an iPhone, which does not allow background processing so she needs to explicitly fire up the maps application to report her location.  I have an Android phone which has this running in the background, so my location at any time is an open book.  Latitude only shares location information with your friends list, so it is an opt-in service.

I was listening to the Buzz Out Loud podcast from CNET recently and one of the hosts commented that she had not disabled the location feature in her phone’s Twitter client and a friend called her to let her know that her home location had been disclosed with her last tweet.  Another interesting thing that has happened recently is the rising popularity of foursquare, which adds a social network element to location based services.  The guys at Pleaserobme.com had a little bit of fun with this recently which is worth a look.  The site has some links to good blog posts on the subject.

One of our first “products” will be the privacy policy for any of our location based apps.  Here are some of the thinking that will probably find it’s way into it:

1. Your location is your business, nobody elses.  If you choose to share it, that should be your choice and no service that shares your location with others should ALWAYS be opt-in.
2. Your travel habits are your business.  For our applications which require knowledge of your location to work, they will not retain that data for any length of time beyond caching, etc. required for proper functioning of the application.  If we ever have an app that does keep these records it will be opt in, private and destroyed when you terminate the service.
3. The specific use of your location information will be made crystal clear for each of our applications, including retention, privacy of the data, etc.

A word of caution to everyone who downloads location based apps on a whim just to play with them (like we do)…make sure that you know where your location data is going, that you’re reasonably sure that the vendor of the app isn’t using them for nefarious purposes (tip – avoid using products from companies with “stalker” in the name), and understand to what degree your privacy will be protected.  Also, if you don’t want people to know where you live or work you might want to shut them down when  you’re not using them.