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Geoinformatics-8-2009
column the rat in my iphone i bought myself a new apple iphone recently. it s really neat, great design, built-in gps, google mapping and vast number of new locationally-aware add-ons from the app store. everything is fine until i need to remove the sim card i m going to libya and need to get a local one. i remove the uk sim card and temporarily replace the holder. but, i put it in the wrong way round and it jams halfway in. i book an appointment and go to the apple genius bar (tech supabout some other geo-ethical issues, particularly the privacy of port to you and me) in a very fancy shop in oxford street, central locationally-based personal data. a recent article in the new london. there i am told that the iphone is terminally damaged scientist, the uk s premier science magazine, titled rat in your celland my only option is to buy a new phone for circa $200. i m phone described how companies that specialise in phishing can angry and relate the story to my friend nick land from esri. he reassemble information from your discarded phone to provide a puts iphone sim card problem into google and sure enough the complete picture of you, your family, business dealings and where blogging world is onto this. there s a stream of invective about you ve been. this being a flaw in the usually excellent apple design standards, but there s also advice force an old sim card you could be sanguine and take the view that back in the slot and hey presto it releases! the genie is out of the bottle . should they at the moment, with a few want to abuse it, your bank, supermarket exceptions, the lack of what s the point of this story? the good (from your loyalty card) and network provider coherent robust support for praise be to the crowd sourced solution, the already knows more about your life than you bad even apple make design mistakes, the do yourself. however, location brings literally geospatial open source can ugly the customer service. an extra dimension to their knowledge about discourage those of us who you. if you leave location services enabled on provide strategy advice from now let s translate this into the geospatial your smartphone and that s usually the recommending it. open source world: default, you are enabling the provider (and possibly who they choose to sell the data crowd sourcing anyway you look at it, its onto) to build up a complete picture of your exciting, whether it be creating new data that helps the third world movements. if you think about that falling into criminal hands it credit where its due to google and openstreetmap (osm); corcould be used for blackmail, burglary or worse. recting errors in mission critical routing databases from navteq; or the wisdom (and selflessness) of people who spend time solvi m with gary gale of yahoo on this one, you should have to opt ing someone else s problem on the other side of the world who in to allowing such data to be reused by others. however, the they ve never met for the love of it. key point is that we, as a geospatial industry, really do have to think about locational data privacy now. otherwise, we ll not have design flaws yes they are bad, but ultimately we live with them, thought through the arguments when someone in government or to paraphrase a presenter at the recent where 2.0 conference in the european commission grabs hold of it as a result of a popular san jose, sure the open source widget doesn t fit perfectly with the press campaign. at that stage, and reacting to public opinion, the architecture of the rest of my system but it s free, so i ll work around chances are that our legislators will do something draconian that its limitations. undermines a lot of the location apps we are starting to depend on, for our livelihoods and in our personal lives. customer support can be ugly. sure, the online technorati are a great resource in the opengeo world. but, when it comes down to application down at 5pm on friday evening before the big upgrade in a multi-national organisation, i m not sure i want to be reliant upon a garage-built component from an open source library. at the moment, with a few exceptions, the lack of coherent robust support for geospatial open source can discourage those of us who provide strategy advice from recommending it. getting the iphone has also caused me to think more seriously andrew coote is a director of consultingwhere, an it consultancy specialising in geospatial technology. you can register for a free copy of their latest assessment of the uk geospatial market at www.consultingwhere.com/reports.htm 28 december 2009
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