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Digital Summit: Indoor Location Technologies Face Privacy Push-Back

GPS doesn’t work well indoors. But Don Dodge, a developer advocate at Google, enthusiastically explained how new indoor location technologies could enable stores to track their shoppers, or firefighters to find their way out of smoky buildings. Several methods of tracking indoor location are being developed by a bevy of startups, as well as giants Google and Apple.

Those technologies include Wi-Fi triangulation, which measures signal strength from nearby Wi-Fi hotspots; Wi-Fi fingerprinting, which logs your phone’s ID number as it seeks out Wi-Fi connectivity; radio beacons that triangulate your position; and LED light fixtures that imperceptibly flicker to encode your location in a way your device’s camera can detect (see “LEDs Could Lead You Right to a Discount”).

Dodge’s talk was the best attended of the day’s sessions. But not everyone in the audience was cheering the trends he described. They took exception to the fact the technologies involved don’t provide easy ways to opt out from having your location tracked.

“Device location by beacon does not always offer opt-in or out. And [other] technologies are able to uniquely identify a user just by their having WiFi turned on,” says Javier Aguera, a co-founder of Blackphone, which is developing a phone that attempts to block such tracking (see “Ultraprivate Smartphones”). He told me that there should be more debate about the rights of the people being tracked by indoor location technology. “We believe users should always be aware of and have control of such activities.”

See the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/528206/digital-summit-indoor-location-tech-faces-privacy-push-back/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140610