Location-based services on mobile phones: Follow me
Adverts that know where you are could be lucrative—not to mention controversial
THE initiative was designed to draw attention to a serious issue and it achieved its goal. Pleaserobme.com is a simple website that publishes a live feed of posts that appear on Twitter, a microblogging service, showing that the authors are somewhere other than their home. Many of the tweets come from users of Foursquare, a service that lets people publicise their location so their friends can see where they are—and businesses can aim advertising at them. Pleaserobme.com’s creators, who also alert the potential victims, say they simply wanted to highlight the fact that users of so-called location-based services often give away information a burglar would love to have.
Although the site is a salutary reminder of the perils of “oversharing”, it is unlikely to deter people from signing up to location-tracking sites. These are still dwarfed by the likes of Twitter and Facebook, but networks such as Foursquare, which has 500,000 users, and Loopt, which boasts over 3m, have been growing fast. They have also attracted cash from venture capitalists who reckon they could become money-spinners. A recent forecast by Juniper Research predicts that global revenues from location-based services could soar to $12.7 billion by 2014, up from $3 billion last year. ...
