GPS, social networking, and privacy

My wife, Jan, shared my usual trip to Glasgow with me yesterday as she was heading for a meeting with Niamh Fitzgerald of the Create Consultancy (they were discussing a CPD programme on drugs and alcohol for Borders teachers - yes, I know, there's a joke in there, but I'll resist the temptation). Jan told me later that Niamh had mentioned that her journo brother, Ronan Fitzgerald, had just had an article published in Guardian Technology. Not just any old article, but the lead article on the front page - Follow You, Follow Me! Ronan's article is about GPS - he focuses on American, Tim Hibbard, who has linked his GPS-enabled mobile phone to his website timhibbard .com/wherestim, and goes on to explore some of the highways and byways that this technology now offers. So, for instance, he writes: "A social networking site could use real-time GPS by letting you add friends to your online profile; perhaps you mark their houses on a map. You also mark other areas where you spend a lot of time - your workplace or your favourite pub. When your friends log on, they can see where you are. You click on their map and you can see where they are. Your phone could even alert you when they're near." The article as a whole put me in mind of the words of my good friend, Robert Skey which I posted under Thoughts from left field... - we seem to be moving into a time in which long-held notions of personal privacy are changing radically. As Robert said: "Modern ICT users are the least private of any generation (blogs, webcams, flickr libraries, google, etc) yet we live in a world built on fear of identity theft and the shadow of our neighbour. Is this simply because the youth know better and the statesmen have yet to adapt to a modern world built on different principles of privacy? How might this affect future laws and modes of society?" However, Ronan also mentions Facebook's recent faux pas - Facebook owner, Mark Zuckerberg, has tried to backtrack, and maybe still has some way to go, but this episode certainly suggests that privacy will remain a big issue for a time to come!

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© John Connell
The views expressed in this weblog are entirely my own and are not intended to reflect the views of any other individuals or organizations. All sources will be fully acknowledged.