Mobile location services: Don’t ruin the pending revolution

In all the hullaballoo about what the next iPhone may bring, whether RIM has lost its mind with the PlayBook tablet, and how Google plans to herd the many Android cats into a cohesive platform — plus, all the FUD on mobile security and management promulgated by dozens of vendors — lost is the notion of location-based services. Known by the acronym LBS, such services hold amazing potential for newfound utility from mobile computing — if the industry doesn’t kill it off first.

Mobile marketers almost sunk location services a decade ago, in that false spring of WAP and (promised but not delivered) 3G networks. They viewed location information as a great way to pummel people with ads and other come-ons, but the nightmare proposition of cell phones beeping every few seconds with a new promo as you walked in a mall or drove down a freeway scared off early adopters and got the civil liberties folks in a (righteous) uproar. It could happen again, if companies latch onto the kind of abusive services for which Facebook is infamous.

Even if the industry is more careful, a lot of what makes location services cool also makes them creepy. For example, at a recent conference, a CIO said he’d love it if his employees broadcast their location via smartphone. That way, if colleagues were at the same airport they could find each other, or if a person were not at her desk, the system would know and be able to forward phone calls or respond with an “away” prompt.

However, such location awareness would also let the manager see where the employee was at nights and on weekends. Sure, you could turn off the locator app — but remembering to do so is an easy step to miss. Many employers already spy on employees this way; it’s standard practice in the delivery industry to monitor each vehicle to make sure drivers don’t goof off while on their rounds, as well as to see if they’re speeding, taking time- and fuel-efficient routes, and so on. It is Big Brotherish, but at least the tracking is of the vehicle, so when the employees aren’t on duty, they’re not trackable.

In an era when personal smartphones and tablets are used for business — and vice versa — as is becoming increasingly common among knowledge workers and sales staff, the issues of being trackable and when that’s OK are messy and off-putting.

The same location detection that lets me find the nearest store with a better price for an item I just scanned on my iPhone can let retailers know where I am so that they can spam me. The same location detection that lets an Android smartphone give me directions to a client’s address can allow my boss to follow my movements.

In some apps, it’s already creepy. I have an iPhone flashlight app that wants to track my location information. For what purpose is never stated. My alarm clock app uses location information to give me the local time and weather, an acceptable reason, but I often wonder what else is being done with that data. We’re in early days, as developers are just starting to realize there’s location information to be had.

As an industry, we’ll need to figure out how to responsibly deal with this information, so we don’t scare off users. Most mobile OSes now alert users when an app wants their location information the first time, so users can decide. But most mobile OSes don’t do more than that. Apple’s iOS is a notable exception: Users can turn location detection on or off for each application individually at any time in its Settings app. An icon appears in the menu bar whenever your location is being tracked.

That’s a good start, but I can’t yet tap that icon to see which app is detecting my location, and I don’t know why each app is tracking my location. As in the case of my flashlight app, it’s not always obvious. I should know what is tracking me when and for what purpose, and I should have finer controls over what is being tracked and who gets to see it — not just an on/off control.

Of course, the more nuanced you make the management controls, the more complex that interface to those controls become and, thus, the less likely users will know why they are managing. Unscrupulous companies know this and create overly complex interfaces for the very purpose of confusing people into giving up more information than they want or realize — the “uncheck to unsubscribe” technique is a simple example of an intentionally confusing design meant to get users to do the opposite of what they intend.

I hope it doesn’t have to come to that. Instead, I hope companies like Apple and Google lead the way at the platform level to let developers and users alike tap into the wonders of location services — and block the abusers from ruining it for everyone.

This article, “Mobile location services: Don’t ruin this pending revolution,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.