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May 29, 2005
LBS and the Future of Media
My Thoughts On LBS
In case you cannot make the LBS panel at BREW2005, here is some food for thought on Location-Based Services: The most compelling consumer apps are also the ones that scare the hell out of the carriers, and there is a chance that they will never see the light of day.
In case you don’t already know, LBS only exists because of E-911. The E stands for Enhanced, not Emergency, as might seem logical. It is the ultimate Caller ID – no numbers can be blocked, not even unlisted numbers, etc. When you call 911 from a landline, your phone number and physical location are passed to the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network.) It is called ANI/ALI – Automatic Number Identification/Automatic Location Identification. This information then routes your call to the PSAP (Public Safety Answering Point) dispatch center closest to you so that they can send an ambulance or whatever you need. Think about it – you don’t dial an area code before 911, so how else is the call going to get to the dispatch center nearest you without knowing your location?
The proliferation of mobile phones created a problem. The wireless networks are like their own clouds in that their network of base stations and towers form a closed communication system. For simplicity’s sake, imagine them plugging the whole wireless network cloud into the PSTN via one big cable. So without the ANI/ALI system used for landlines, all the PSTN could possibly know is that a call originated from someone somewhere on the wireless carrier’s network, which could be anywhere in the country. Not good, when you get connected to the emergency dispatch center in New York but you live in LA.
So then the industry had to develop their version of ANI/ALI to pinpoint the locations of mobile consumers who call 911. There are different ways to do this. You can put a GPS transponder in every handset or you can triangulate a user’s location based on how close they are to various cell towers, or you can do a combination of both. The goal is to get the closest proximity of a user to route the call to the correct dispatch center and then quickly dispatch emergency assistance without having to get further location details from the caller, which is sometimes impossible.
This stuff still fascinates me - I started my career as an engineering wireless consultant at a firm that specialized in trunked radio communication systems for public safety. We helped deploy regional wireless trunked VHF and 800 MHz radio communication systems. (And some UHF, but don’t take that as a sign of my age – analog UHF and VHF arguably propagate better through trees, so the fire chiefs used to like it better.) I don’t think I was very good at it. I liked flying around in helicopters with topographic maps deciding where to put towers, but antenna tilt-down calculations were not my forte. It is a nontrivial problem to solve the communication needs of Fire/Police/EMS all using a scarce spectrum resource and having to share maybe only a few channels among dozens of groups to coordinate an agency-wide response to something major like an earthquake or other disaster. 911 dispatch centers are intense places, particularly at night and on full moons, when everything bad and weird seems to happen. The entire emergency services communications infrastructure is an awesome thing to contemplate, from wireless 911 to call routing to dispatch centers back over closed wireless networks to mobile emergency personnel in the field. Now picture it all held together with spit and tape.
Anyway. The wireless industry has done a fine job of addressing the issue even given various delays, as I am sure it has not been easy. And now we have handsets that know where they are, which is an engineering feat. Nevermind that the whole reason for it is safety – what about all the cool and useful applications that could be developed if the carriers passed this information to application developers? Location adds a sort of Z-axis to many existing applications and creates the very reason for other to exist. The opportunity in value that can be created for consumers is easily in the billions of dollars per year.
So What’s The Problem?
The biggest challenge facing our industry is not a technical issue, it is a policy issue. We need to decide how exactly we are going to handle the very personal information that is a person’s specific location at a specific time. Fleet management is one thing. That is a low-risk deployment that can be fairly well controlled. But what about the guy using LBS to stalk his ex-girlfriend? Weird creepy guy, and his approach was decidedly low-tech, taping the handset to the bottom of her car, but still it shows the dark side of real-time specific-location applications. Or how about the guy who got fined $450 for speeding - not by the cops, but by his rental car company that had installed GPS on its cars. Parents are tracking their kids' whereabouts.
Read about these here.
I am reminded of the Sopranos episode where Tony gets a new SUV and the first thing he does is rip the navigation system out of the dashboard because he doesn’t want to risk the feds possibly knowing where he is.
Real-time specific-location applications can only be developed on a slippery slope, and I must say that I personally side with Tony Soprano on the issue. Just because I am paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get me.
I should note that we worked for a very long time with our carrier partners to understand their tolerance for LBS pain. As such, Rabble handles location in a very unique and intuitive way that enhances the application’s functionality without ever revealing a user’s location, not even if they want to, and not even to someone they trust. This is another reason carriers love Rabble – it is a location-aware application but not necessarily a location-based application, and it was built with a carrier’s view of the world in mind. Once you see Rabble, I think you will agree that it makes perfect sense.
I do not know of any industry-wide agreement on a policy around LBS, but it is the first thing that has to be addressed before carriers start handing out LBS APIs to everyone.
I wonder if the ACLU is going to question the way LBS handles location information. It is one thing to transmit my location only after I dial 911, but what about constantly pinging the network with my specific location? Is that an invasion of my privacy and a violation of my civil liberties? How accessible is this information? Who gets to see it at any given time? What are the policies around it? Does the user always have the option to turn the feature off so that he or she cannot be tracked?
The network operators see an opportunity to monetize location information in consumer applications, but they also see risk. They have the data, and it would be a shame not to offer compelling new functionality for their subscribers. This is basically an issue of privacy, and this discussion has been going on for years. I stated my personal opinion in the last sentence of this USA Today article a couple of years ago. Generally speaking, I believe that privacy is something that people are willing to give up in increments, based on the cost and benefit of doing so. You want to rescue me from a ravine I fell into while hiking? Yeah, track my location. You want to give my boss the ability to see that I am drinking at Harry’s Bar on my lunch break? Now that I don’t like. (We only occassionally drink at Harry’s Bar at lunch, btw.)
Personal privacy in the mobile connected world will be available, but it will be expensive and only a very few people will pay for it. The rest of us will plug into the location-based grid because of the efficient markets that will be built around location information. At some point, the risk will be bled out of the system and there won’t be any other way to participate in society. The network effect takes over. I remember a time before fax machines, and my life didn’t seem incomplete. Then all of a sudden everyone had one and they simply expected that they could send you a fax. It became a part of business society. Email was the same way. Then IM. Now everyone I talk to in Europe asks where they can find me on Skype. When you think about it, IM sort of transmits your location in a way. It tells people right where you are – in front of your computer. All communication is converging into the simple concept of presence: The right communication medium for the right place and time. I think LBS is going to play a huge part in the mobile connected future because location will become an aspect of communication. The market will find the sweet spot, and the network operators and content providers will agree on a solution for location information that makes sense for everyone. In the meantime, the market will not wait for policymakers to bring value to consumers if they are willing to pay for it.
LBS is the key to the citizen journalism future
(Okay, maybe this is a post about populist media.) Privacy issues aside, the network operators should be looking to media as their biggest opportunity to monetize location information without incurring the safety and privacy issues of real-time location applications. As a populist media company, we built Rabble purposely as one such application, btw. Location of a person is one thing, but the location of the media they create is another. One of the keys to building a trusted citizen journalism network is a network-certified and generally tamper-proof time and date stamp. If Reuters is going to employ a million amateur stringers around the world armed with mobile connected camcorders recording content as it happens, such a content collection system has to be trusted – the content simply has to be real. The vetting process won’t exist when you are dealing with the ordinary rabble of the world, so something else has to take its place. If Reuters is going to act as an editor of such content, they have to know that they can stake their reputation on it. This is easy to solve with a network-certified time and location stamp. Without it, how can Reuters know for sure that I didn’t Photoshop the picture I sent? Or that the picture I sent is happening in the location in which I claim it is happening? The network operators hold the keys to this information and they can charge for it.
Now think about the collection side of citizen journalism. Imagine a map of the world with little dots lighting up whenever someone sends Reuters an interesting picture or video. When something big happens, a lot of people take interesting pictures and you will see a particularly bright spot on the map. Imagine combing the world for hotspots in this way and being able to zoom in with a click and extract the media and represent it to the rest of the world through your distribution network. In fact, the purest form of this would not even have an intermediary, rather consumers would be in control of the interface, freely combing the world for whatever media interests them by location and topic.
That is the future of the news media: Enabler, not editor. And this media future cannot exist without LBS.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at May 29, 2005 06:47 PM