There’s Location, and Then There’s Location

A few hours after we posted our location as context post last week, Twitter announced the same. With very different approaches.

I encourage you to go check out the Mashable discussion; many commenters are worried about opting out. Ignoring the problem of carelessly reading the announcement (maybe they just read the title?), there is a lot of concern about automatic tracking of location.

Few people, I believe, will want to live-stream to the world their location. Yes, of course many people will. But the over-30 woman typical of Twitter and Facebook? Probably not. Will she want to use location for their updates? Probably.

Location accuracy, precision, and comprehension

A quick primer: precision is the number of decimal places you measure something to; accuracy is how correct it is. The less accurate you think your measurement is, the less precise you should report it.

Read the blog post where this image comes from, and Steven complains about precision and accuracy at more length.

If you are a Verizon Blackberry user in a particular part of the Kansas City metro, your location is reported as what we believe is the actual tower location. A single tower in a warehouse area, not a triangulation of visible towers. Nevertheless, location in Google Latitude is reported as a single point. Very precise. Great for weather and maybe traffic; terrible for directions and geocaching. Location information is valuable at different accuracies, as long as we don't pretend it's precise.

Regardless of accuracy or precision, the usability of latitude/longitude information is terrible. It's useless to most people without a decoder, such as Google Maps. Nobody knows what 38.949984,-95.236038 is; many won't be able to tell you what hemisphere it is in. Actually, even Google doesn't know what it is, and provides only an address range. (Answer: approximately where my office desk is.)

So better than lat/long is an address (1901 Massachusetts St.) or a place name (Little Springs Design headquarters.) The preferred one depends on context. Sometimes absolute position is irrelevant, and only relative position is relevant (8 blocks south of downtown, or 3 blocks east of me.)

And many times absolute location is irrelevant, and only type or name of the location is relevant. And this is quite interesting for those commenters above. I don't mind telling the world I'm in a coffee shop, or in Starbucks, or a grocery store. Immediate family will know what city I'm in, and likely what physical place I'm in. Coworkers will know city and type of establishment. Family and friends far away will know type of establishment and maybe city. Strangers will know type of establishment only. We leverage the knowledge inside our network to provide privacy.

Some uses of location

These are largely social focused use.

Location as context

Location provides useful context to many status updates. Not geolocation; latitude and longitude require the reader to take several steps to understand the information being transmitted, and few will bother. Our discussion last week was for location as context; take a look at the Design For Mobile wiki page for explicit logic.

Many times location such as "Kansas City" provides absolutely no context. An update such as "Bad coffee day" is unexplained with a city as a context; it's very relevant with Starbucks or the office as a context. Which Starbucks? Which office? Nobody cares.

Latitude/longitude does not work for context. Too many steps for just better understanding context. Maybe some day there will be a single, easy-to-use solution, but I don't see anything likely on the horizon.

Automatic location does not work well for context. Which location? Henry's? Coffee Shop? Downtown? Lawrence? Kansas? One of those will likely be the appropriate context; the others won't make sense. And how does the machine decide? There's some theory, but I don't see it being easy and automatic.

Location for discovery

Based on the state of the blogosphere, many people believe that status updates to aid discovery will be big. They envision an augmented reality (or just a map) feed to see what is going on in a particular place. This could be useful, "It's dead in here. I'm heading out." could help somebody decide whether to enter an establishment.

I'm not sure this will be huge. Sure, it will be nice... in certain limited environments. Who is saying that it's dead? If it's my friend, I care. If it's a stranger, someone needs to build a whole other level of scarily-intrusive collaborative filtering to determine if you care. By myself, I've no idea whether it's relevant. And my friend is unlikely to be in that establishment. (I'd sure like to know if they are!)

Location as status

Work, home, kids' soccer, undefined. What if that was the entire list of locations? If the tool of your choice detected if you were in one of these, and set your status accordingly?

In this scenario, "undefined" is very interesting. This lack of data provides information, but only to people close to me. Office workers know I'm not at the office. My partner knows, based on the time of day and other information, that I am on my way home.

The inspiration for this was actually an automatic location system proposed at the Design For Mobile 2008 conference by Jared Benson of Punchcut. In particular, he noted that the human aspects of location comprehension.

Foursquare is attempting something like this, though its users are sometimes providing just city information and sometimes street address. But as best I can tell, the user must manually check in and out of locations. Somebody please advise how it actually works (the web site doesn't say.) Brightkite seems to work in much the same way, and I probably missed some more.

Location for...

Most of this post has focused on Facebook, Twitter, and social uses of location. However, there is a lot more available. Here are 47 location services ideas.

Setting up when your location is public and when it’s more private sounds like something that most people won’t bother with, though. Given my Facebook experiences, even when you do provide users with finer degrees of privacy control they don’t tend to use them and stick with the defaults. This, of course, explains the hue and cry when the defaults aren’t very privacy friendly.

The hard problem doesn’t seem to be context-sensitive applications, but privacy sensitive ones that build the access control systems in a more usable manner.

> Setting up when your location is public and when it’s more private sounds like something that most people won’t bother with, though.

Actually, I think that’s a key point. It better be automatic (or, like the manual tagging, something inherent in a manual process) or it’s pointless. No setup process, however simple, has any chance of success.

We love context, so I’d say everything is keyed to context. More context-sensitive apps still seem key to me. For those who worry about privacy, I am not sure /anything/ is not privacy-sensitive.

And while I am being a little snide about this (I think a lot of privacy concerns are ill-founded kneejerk backlash) really it means everything should be designed with privacy and security in mind. Not in the sense of more passwords, but with good basic processes, like not even knowing sensitive user information much less not storing it too long, etc.

I’ve seen far too much stupid stuff so don’t think individual services will fix this, and we need a change in the philosophy of programmatic use of private information.

Yes, agree! There is a lot to location. There is also many possibilities.
At Ericsson Labs they have a API for location that handles user consent.
https://labs.ericsson.com/apis/web-location

The Ericsson API seems pretty typical of these sorts of things, and I think make a lot of people uneasy. The location itself is shared with the third party, tied to the user identity. There’s no reason the location will not be saved forever. And “consent” just means runtime opt-out. It seems there should be a cleaner, more seamless way to do it all.

I am not program/apps/computer, etc., astute, but my concern for the location issue is freedom. I would want to know that if I had not chosen to have my location known, it would not be. To me, we should be free to be wherever we want to be without anyone else knowing our location unless WE decide they can know. So, are you saying when you state that it is a “kneejerk” concern, you do not consider that kind of freedom of privacy to be important? It appears that even opting out does not really prevent tracking, regardless of precision or accuracy. NEVER give up any freedom you have, even temporarily, for you never know when or if you will get it back in the future. Since 9/11, we have given up far too many freedoms under the guise of protection or convenience in the country. I have nothing to hide, but I like knowing I could hide if I choose to do so, and still keep up with what is happening in the world. Gee, that sounds so “survivalist” but I grew up in a time when citizens were cautious with their rights.
Thanks for “listening” though my concerns have probably already been addressed in some way.

But the way it works is quite simple.

1. If you want your location to be shared, you type in your location. (there are several details here)

2. If you do not want your location to be shared, you do nothing.

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