If you visited websites recently, often you found that the website was tailored not just to your our language settings, but also to your own location.
As an example, search websites now have “virtual” country search sites- and, of course, spammers too.
While companies redesigned their (physical) logistics chain, often the value of geolocalization (i.e. pinpointing your location) is not fully accessible to all the people involved, from customers, to affiliates, to partners.
In this short article, a couple of questions and some ideas- with examples from both online and offline activities.
This article is nominally part of the “technical” series, but, thinking in systemic terms, I will adopt a motivational approach.
Quite too often we from the technical side of reality forget that a technology is a tool to an end.
If you read once in a while my blog, you know that my definition of “technical experts’ includes economists, sociologists, organizational development experts, etc- not just the usual ICT experts or self-defined experts.
If you want- anything that requires an interpretation and comes with a specific “lingo”.
It is a field of expertise, and requires some efforts on both sides (the experts and their public) to allow the best integration of the expertise within everyday choices- from the end consumer to CEO and head of state.
Defining geolocalization
A more technical description and discussion of the issues is available online (as usual, start with Wikipedia and move around), but I will adopt few perspectives: governement, suppliers, distribution networks, private and corporate end users.
First, common issue: geolocalization includes tools covering local (such as the passive RFID “labels” inside the packaging of your supermarket), positioning (such as mobile phones, telling where they are whenever they get close enough to a new “point of presence” of telco operators, whatever technology is used), geographical uses (such as satellite phones or future active RFID with batteries, and other indipendent transmitting device).
Therefore, it is not just what you see online (the website offering new products), but also what you carry around in your wallet (I will ignore for the time being the issue of “secure” ID cards using RFID, that have already been “cracked” by technicians with few minutes of work and limited expense).
Common to all the perspectives is that geolocalization does not respect borders, jurisdictions, local privacy laws: if you have a mobile phone in your pocket, the level of privacy that you get is not the one of your mother country, as you probably assume, but that of the country that you are visiting.
And as I repeatedly discovered since the Data Privacy Directive was first issued in the last quarter of the XX century, there is something that unites corporate and private citizens with their government employees: the folk-tale, imprecise level of knowledge about the privacy rights and duties.
I have to admit: I also met across European Union “experts” in data privacy who assumed that passing an exam would be enough to qualify as experts- and were, let’s say, happily oblivious to the latest changes.
The reason for this digression on privacy is simple: geolocalization is a pervasive technology, and it is absolutely unregulated (or assumed to be so from most of the players involved).
But after this introduction, let’s move to the first motivational profile: governments.
Geolocalization and governments
Let’s be frank: states are defined by borders. And once you set the borders, you want to control what happens inside.
The up side of the pre-computer era was that collecting and storing information was expensive, and the same people collecting and processing the information could “leak” to private entities or other states.
Therefore, collection and processing were prioritized.
Information and communication technologies allow states to increment the volume and speed of data collection geometrically, while costs are often shifted to commercial entities, usually in the form of additional requirements to be authorized to exercise a business (from the cash counter that tracks credit card numbers, to banks required to disclose increasingly detailed and instantaneous information about the financial transactions of their customers, and so on).
Some countries adopted universal jurisdiction for an increasing number of crimes, but they still need the cooperation of other countries to keep track of their own citizens while abroad- including in the event of natural disasters.
An interesting value added of geolocalization could be that once an end customer is listed as resident in a certain country, that country could receive information automatically also when the citizen is outside its borders.
If this sound too invasive- it is the same approach proposed for some agreements on tracking the financial resources kept by citizens abroad.
Moreover, some states probably would like that their own privacy rules apply to their own citizens while abroad.
Therefore, most countries would try to negotiate a “traceability” for electronic communications (e.g. Internet, e-mail; but also your own credit card uses), to avoid that citizens circumvent the law by connecting with electronic systems abroad to actually access illegal systems in their own country (the usual suspects: terrorists, sex, criminal, political extremists).
Geolocalization and suppliers
Just one concept: individual marketing.
If the geolocalization tools (e.g. RFID labels) were to become really cheap, probably most consumer goods companies would be interested in tracing each unit of each product- and until it is consumed (wait for biodegradable RFID labels and nanotechnology).
For the time being, companies use already your IP address when you visit their website to show you offers (supposedly) available only in your town.
Often, it is just an old social engineering trick- I make you believe that I am already in your environment, to lower your defenses, and motivate impulse shopping.
The interesting part for companies would be integrating all the geolocalization not only in managing the deliveries (as currently done by companies such Amazon), but across all their range of product and services, and integrating the information with databases that link your unique identity to your geolocalization devices.
Scary? Well, until it is unregulated, or requires just to click on an innocent “accepting third part marketing”, it is too good an opportunity to miss.
Geolocalization and distribution networks
If you distribute product or services, your knowledge of and presence in your local market are the main sources of your negotiating power with suppliers.
That’s also why some online suppliers use geolocalization to show offers to customers, but require that their distributors (usually called online “affiliates”) register in a specific jurisdiction and with one of their branches.
Geolocalization is a potential source of a conflict between suppliers and distribution networks: if you want, as Amazon did for books, any company could have more information about the end (private or corporate) users than the distribution network used to disclose, weakening the negotiating position of the distribution network.
A further risk: by giving to the suppliers direct access to the customers’ information, the distribution network would be unable to shift suppliers- and would lose control of its own customer base.
As you noticed, I showed no positive side-effects for distribution networks: because what they gain (improved efficiency, by tracking products and customers) is minimal versus what they lose (control of their customer base).
Geolocalization and private/corporate end users
I know- “end users” sounds so much “information technology-only”.
But it is not.
In the XXI century, as each product will carry an information side (RFID, etc), we will not buy cookies.
We will choose cookies and de facto inform our supplier (and their distribution network) about our aggregate preferences- eventually, if cost will allow, also when and where we actually “use” their cookies.
From a citizen’s perspective, some legislative initiatives (e.g. forbidding cold calling at home, or the spam statutes in various countries) are already trying to avoid a backlash response from consumers.
But what is still an open issue, complementary to the demand from the states, is how far your privacy should extend- and if it should be limited by jurisdiction or by residency.
I would expect future technologies (e.g. credit cards embedded in mobile phones) to add the “geolocalization privacy” option- set by default to “on” (i.e. where I am is not disclosed).
As a citizen (private or corporate does not make any difference) I am quite skeptical when I read about initiatives to create new government databases storing whatever they want- and stating two funny additional facts.
First, that (almost) any government employee will be allowed access, under the strictest security rules.
Second, that for security reasons, famous people and politicians will be kept off the database.
It seems that the possibility of somebody “leaking” information (for fun or for profit) was considered by the proponents of the database- but citizens ceased to be equal under the “common law”.
As a corporate citizen, I would be scared about these databases, as past misuses showed.
A practical example.
In a country that I would not name, a colleague was in a negotiation.
As customary before entering sensible financial transactions with an unknown party, he asked for a financial report from an agency.
He asked my advice.
I needed to browse the report for few seconds to tell him: if you want, I can tell you right away that these guys have on their “unofficial” payroll a banking employee, and I can tell you the bank he is working for, because beside being unfaithful, he is also quite stupid.
Can you imagine if that unfaithful employee had had access to aggregated databases?
Tags: geolocalization, jurisdiction, privacy, rfid, tracking