[Geowanking] On geo privacy policies

[Kjetil Kjernsmo]

On Thursday 29 June 2006 12:39, Dan R. Greening wrote:
> When last I checked, EU law precludes  
> things like geography-based personalization, like the stuff Nathan  
> Eagle does, because you cannot store location-tracking information  
> with user-identification in the EU ... like EVER... even if you  
> inform the consumer.  A whole class of applications is now verboten  
> there.

I can't really agree. That you cannot _store_ the location of a user 
doesn't mean that you cannot use it if the user willingly provides it 
to you. So, the way to do this is that the user's device itself knows 
its location (by a built-in GPS, being in range of bluetooth devices 
with an ID, or something). If the user wants geography-based 
personalisation, the user agent communicates the necessary data to the 
provider, the provider acts upon it, but doesn't store it.

That's the general privacy-friendly approach to things, I feel. Fact is, 
my little phone has 42 MB of non-volatile memory, which can contain all 
information I would willingly share with anyone (for the lifetime of 
the phone), and I bring it along everywhere. It can communicate over 
GPRS over long range or Bluetooth over short range. So, everything is 
there, ask me politely to share it and let me know how it will be 
useful to me, and I'll give you the information (possibly by some 
automated method). 

Well, I'm sort of a transparency guy too, but I'd really like to try 
this approach out first.

Cheers,

Kjetil
-- 
Kjetil Kjernsmo
Programmer / Astrophysicist / Ski-orienteer / Orienteer / Mountaineer
kjetil at kjernsmo.net
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