What is it with Location Based Services? Knowing the pretty exact whereabouts of a person (or at least their phone) seems a pretty exciting concept, but no one seems to be able to actually translate this information into something that sounds even vaguely interesting to the user - or works from a conceptual point of view.
BT have launched a whole range of LBS stuff today and frankly, I can’t summon up the energy to even yawn about them - unlike young Hayden McNamee pictured here. According to Net4Now, BT will be wholesaling LBS to its mobile operator and ISP customers, for them to sell on to the end user. Included in the range is:
- Child and elderly people tracking
- Traffic and directions
- Find my nearest things like ATM’s, supermarkets and Petrol/Gas stations.
- Employee spying (actually they call it “tracking”)
Child tracking, as I’ve written before, is founded on two basically wrong assumptions.
The first is that in the distressing case of an abduction, the kidnapper doesn’t know that the phone can be tracked. The first thing they do unfortunately, is dump or switch off the phone. So any peace of mind about that use is false.
The second assumption is that such services track the child. They don’t. They track the phone. Therefore, if you’re using it to spy on your kids, all you’re doing is monitoring where their phone will be - which most kids can work out pretty quickly will be where they are meant to be, even when they themselves are miles away partying and doing drugs.
Old people tracking? For the life of me, I can’t see why the elderly might consent to be tracked or why others might want to track them. It’s not as if there a major crime wave inpensioner-napping. And if they’re the kinds of people who get lost regularly, shouldn’t they be cared for in a different way altogether?
Feel free to educate me on this one.
Yes, traffic and direction, if you don’t have a nav system in your car can be useful, in extremis. But hardly exciting.
Find my nearest apps have been around for a while now and frankly, there isn’t much a demand for them. Most people spend most of their time in an area they know ie where they live and work. And even if they wander out of this zone, do they really need to ask their mobile where the ATM is? In most towns in the UK, you only have to wander about 100 m in any direction to come across about 10 of them.
And how often, are you driving along in an area you don’t know, do you have sudden urge to hit the supermarket?
Which leaves employee tracking services, that I’ve written about before too.
So while it’s laudable that BT are deploying LBS, they really need to go back to basics and ask why anyone would want to use any of these services, at least on more than an occasional basis. But coming up with answers to this, probably needs a type of creativity that would not typically be found working in a large corporate like BT.
So they should be asking others to help them come up with the applications for LBS, leaving BT’s considerable engineering skills to develop and deploy the resulting applications that people might actually want.
love your blog. very useful. think you are a little pessimistic on this one tho - if mobile tracking works just once or twice out of X times to help find a kid then it’s all good.
Re: child tracking for spying on your kids - it’s a piece of mind thing as much as anything else - I’d like to know roughly where my children just to see there approximately where they’re supposed to be. On the point of kids ditching their phones to be untrackable - try separating a 10-18yr old from their mobile - it is not easy!!
ant
Hi Ant
Thanks for the comments.
Please don’t misunderstand me - I’ve been a keen advocate and supporter of LBS for a long time now, even when the fashion is to disparage and delay deployment.
However, I’ve thought about a lot about child tracking and interviewed some kids and parents. It’s therefore the one area I do not believe in, simply because these companies charge for a service that can’t deliver most of the time - if ever.
In the case of abduction, remember how in old films people knew that their call could be traced if they stayed too long on the line? Well, it’s the same with this. The mobile is the first thing to go. A case in point is the Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman case a few years again the UK. Ian Huntley dumped the girls’ phones before anything else.
I take your point about separating a kid and a phone. But I also think you’re underestimating the ingenuity of kids, who know a lot more about tech than their parents. I’ve talked to kids on these tracking systems and they just have a second phone - what do you think happens to those upgrade models?
There’s one school in Germany (where I live) where the teachers ban mobile use during the day. The kids actually have to hand their phones in and claim them back in the evening. The kids just hand in their old phones and happily go on using their new ones in secret.
So the only possible use for this kind of thing is where a child gets lost somehow. In other words, it’s not abduction and it’s not a case of the child deliberately going off course - playing truant etc.
This does happen, but usually to much younger kids and very, very rarely. And in every case that I can remember, they’re found pretty quickly.
So my issue here is that the technology doesn’t really have a solution for the problem. These companies make money by preying on parental fears and selling something that actually doesn’t make their kids any safer.
Worse - there’s a danger of parent feeling a false sense of security and safety that is purely illusory.
Indeed, in some cases parents have started to use these systems as a replacement for responsible child care. Fortunately, this is rare, but will increase if these products take off.
We’re very lucky that cases of child abduction are still very rare, despite being hyped by the media and governments with vested interests in maintaining a state of fear in society. But these products simply don’t make it less likely that your kid will be abducted, or saved if they are. Since that is the central premise of child tracking systems, I frankly think they should be banned - they’re not fit for the purpose that they’re being sold for and certainly under UK law, that means they contravene existing legislation.
However, I fully accept that I might be wrong on this. Can anyone give me an example anywhere of a child being saved by location tracking?
Russell
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I want to use location based services, but to date they’re been far to expensive a proposition to implement for the end user to be of any actual creative use. A shame really.
I am trying to create something which will be useful in this area (and certainly would send the beta application to you when its ready). But, posts like this make my fear of developing applications go away. Or rather put in simple way, i can’t belive the lag of useful services and applications in this area when the whole required infrastructure is there, and then i think myself, Am i stupid to develop this but I guess not.
There are whole bunch of mobile services required and people go on developing stupid stuff which hits low rate of probebale requirements, for example, finding housing listing near your location. If I am looking for a house, all listings are available on internet. Very low chance of someone searching the house on cell.