Who Owns Your Location Information?

from the where's-waldo? dept

Thu, Nov 9th 2006 10:33am — Carlo Longino

Location-based services have long been a hot topic in wireless, even if they've largely failed to live up to the ridiculous level of hype thus far. However, even though relatively few handsets currently have the ability to pinpoint users' locations with the accuracy of GPS, operators do keep less detailed location information, such as the towers from which calls are made or messages sent. This information is used for different reasons, such as billing, and is more commonly being used by law enforcement as forensic evidence. One researcher who was called as an expert witness in a trial recently to help explain such evidence is now wondering just who owns that location information. Obviously in criminal cases, it must be subpoenaed from an operator, but the researcher says his operator won't even provide him with the location info they have regarding his own calls. It's also unclear what operators' policies are with this information. Some operators are already delivering aggregated location information to companies that use it to determine how road traffic is moving. While this is anonymous, general data, what if operators decided they could start a nice new revenue line by selling individual information to anybody who wanted it? As location-based services proliferate, these sorts of questions are bound to pop up more frequently. While the services do have the potential to be very useful, they'll also need to come with safeguards that allow people to control who can see their location data and how it can be used.

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20 Comments

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Carlo, 9 Nov 2006 @ 10:32am

thanks
Thanks for providing that, Ellen -- however, I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere in those terms of service operators love so much, customer give that permission to their operator.
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Ellen, 9 Nov 2006 @ 10:32am

Who Owns Your Location Information?
In the U.S., YOU own your location information. On Oct. 26, 1999, President Clinton signed into law the Wireless Communications and Public Safety Act of 1999. This legislation authorized telecommunications carriers to provide call location information concerning a user of a commercial mobile service (e.g., a cell phone user) to: (1) emergency dispatchers and emergency service personnel in order to respond to the user's call; (2) the user's legal guardian or family member in an emergency situation that involves the risk of death or serious physical harm; or (3) providers of information or data base management services solely for assisting in the delivery of emergency services. Disclosure to any other person requires a customer's express prior authorization. Precise location information is opt-in. Not for sale without permission.
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Russ, 9 Nov 2006 @ 10:32am

CPNI
The wireless company I work for requires all employees to complete training in the CPNI rules imposed by the FCC. Is Techdirt actually proposing increased government regulations? Here's the first link I found relative to the FCC and CPNI: http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/phoneaboutyou.html
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Republican Gun, 9 Nov 2006 @ 10:42am

Yes....
But what will the board at HP do with information like this?
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Unknowledgeable Geek, 9 Nov 2006 @ 10:42am

Patent
I am going to patenet away to manipulate data regarding locations based on cell phone towers.

Money, money, money.....
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shane, 9 Nov 2006 @ 11:13am

as far as i know my phones all have the ability to turn off this feature with the exclusion of 911. my nextel is under gps, privacy. i know that's only gps, but still there are options.
If you are really that concerned with it get disposable phones or phone cards.
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Sanguine Dream, 9 Nov 2006 @ 11:30am

Oh dear...
The day I start getting spam text messages and phone calls (which will certainly cost me my airtime minutes) will be the day I will seriously consider giving up on cell phone technology altogether.
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Peter Cranstone, 9 Nov 2006 @ 11:41am

GPS location on a mobile phone
Hi Carlo,

We've developed a technology that allows you to stream GPS data over HTTP from a mobile phone. This link shows you a picture of it. http://www.5o9inc.com

To safeguard the users privacy we've enable the customer to selectively share the information. With a click of the mouse they can disable the "send lat,long information"

Cheers,

Peter
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henry evans, 9 Nov 2006 @ 12:09pm

location information
The interesting question is not who owns the information, but what is it worth. As long as it's worth some non-trivial sum, isn't it reasonable to expect that contracts between subscribers and service providers will deal with the ownership question?
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Nov 2006 @ 12:38pm

Re: location information
I believe that is the problem is that it isn't defined in the contract that you or anyone else has any specific rights to the data. It is basically personal data that is collected on you that you don't have any right to or any right to restrict access to (as it stands currently). To me, it is worth a lot and I would like to see in a contract that I control how that information is used.
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Nate, 9 Nov 2006 @ 12:39pm

Don't forget IP addresses
My web company uses IP address geolocation extensively, for relatively innocent things like default language determination, but also for more interesting purposes, such as ad targeting and even assessing user worth. I know that many, if not most, mid-sized to large commercial websites do this.

I think its worth bringing this up because many Internet users surf under an assumption that their whereabouts are completely unknown to the sites that they visit, which is simply not the case.
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Nov 2006 @ 12:49pm

Re: Patent
I already own a patent on patents so poney up.
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Liz Coker, 9 Nov 2006 @ 12:55pm

Customers Should Own Their Location Data
This is no different than the issue of having access to your own medical records. Release of this information (other than for legitimate legal purposes or emergency notifications) should be determined by the user.

Being able to opt-in or opt-out of sharing location information should be simple, easy, and USER controlled. I and my partners at 5o9, Inc. feel very strongly about this topic and have created technology that makes this possible.
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Geren, 9 Nov 2006 @ 2:42pm

Re: Oh dear...
I've already gotten unsolicited sales calls on my cell, and spam SMS messages. Believe me, I'm not happy about it, but at this point, I can't work without the damned thing.
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foofdawg, 9 Nov 2006 @ 4:06pm

friggin spam
Strange, Liz' post would have been completely innocuous if she had just said "I and my partners feel....".

Instead when you couple it with Peter's comment, it becomes apparent what the intention of posting here is.

Shame, shame.
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Nov 2006 @ 5:05pm

Re: Re: Patent
I already own a patent on your mums pussy so, your daddy, and 200 uncles all owe me big time.....
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misanthropic humanist, 9 Nov 2006 @ 5:22pm

Who owns your X
You do. By definition. Of course "ownership" is another empty human construct, but it will take another 100 years for the majority of people to overcome this most basic misunderstanding.

Have fun arguing over whether black is white in the meantime.
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Data Buyer, 10 Nov 2006 @ 2:47pm

Good For Marketers
Speaking from a Marketers Perspective the boom in information availability is a blessing. In past days it took very deep pockets to leverage good marketing data, but now that information is becoming more prevalent, sites like odditysoftware.com and others have made it easier to get out of the gate making location based and business centric database downloads that small businesses and marketers can afford.
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William C Bonner, 10 Nov 2006 @ 6:54pm

When will they send you speeding tickets via your
I am just waiting for the local governments to decide that they can simply send me speeding tickets because they saw my phone traveling down the freeway at 70mph.

Try arguing that you might have been riding in the light rail that runs down the center of the freeway.
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canthy, 23 Jul 2007 @ 7:42am

The operator who owns our location information should do their job in legality, how can they forward our location information to someone who will want it.

For ours, when we are enter some website to apply a permit to get information, shouldn't leave more detail about private information.

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