Location Based Services lead to Stalking - Whoddathunkit?

Here is an interesting realisation on the personal economics of LBS:

Simply: too much work and risk, too little reward.

All I got were quite a few stalker like experiences grouped with a shift of my thinking about location based services from expression of physical identity to needless ego boost.

One specific interaction really bothered me to look at the benefits of these services. I had someone look up historical data on my checkins and put themselves in places so they would ‘run into me.’ Once I switched my habits, they did as well (that is when I figured it out).

Their response: ‘well, you put it out there.’

I did. I opted in to getting stalked. From a stalkers point of view, this is a goldmine. Foursquare for example lists the picture and location of recently crowned mayors on their homepage. Here is a picture of someone, with the address of the place they usually hang out. I find that troubling, especially for someone just wanting to share with friends.

So Whoddathunkit? Well, us for a start - we predicted it (see here) and the diagram we drew at the time (see above) shows why - the top right hand corner is the best for the service providers but not for users.

Quid Est Demonstratum.

Now what annoys me is that this sort of stuff is fairly trivial to predict (Human nature + low cost access to voyeuristic levels of private data), so one can't pretend that it came out the blue as a total surprise. And this example is pretty mild re its outcome - if you take what you can do with pervasive LBS to its logical conclusions you can get some far more risky behaviours.

To be clear - I am not against Location Based services, just the types designed to operate in the top right corner which really are a "stalkers charter". As Stowe Boyd points out, you can use services with lower resolution. And as our chart above shows, the best services for their users lie in other quadrants, but of course these are harder to monetise via Ad-serving and datamining.

My greater concern is that the next generation of LBS will be game based, which will tempt (typically younger and naive people) to disclose even more information, as no doubt these games will reward people for behaviour that hands over more and more personal data (see analysis here).

Our privacy is being sold down the river, I am coming to the view that the only way to sort these abuses out before they go too far is via pre-emptive legal restrictions.