What do I need to know about location services?
Location services enable you to share your physical location with your online friends and find out where they are.
If you’ve got a smart phone (like an iPhone or a Blackberry) or a portable Web-enabled device, such as a games console or laptop, you can do this on the move with services like Foursquare, Google Latitude and Gowalla. Or, you might link your social networking profile with a location app. If you’re on Facebook, for example, you might be interested in their new ‘Places’ service, which enables users to easily share their physical location with their Facebook friends.
Although location services can be very useful (eg Google Maps locating where you logged on from), they also bring certain challenges and risks. In fact, more than half of respondents in a recent UK survey said they worry about loss of privacy from using geo-location data (Source: Webroot, June 2010).
As a teacher, they’re another thing you need to consider when it comes to protecting your privacy and keeping a clear line between your professional and personal life. It might be fun to tell your friends you’re “at the gym” or “in the pub” but do you really want your students, students’ parents, colleagues and other people to know where you are and what you’re doing at any given moment? To help with this, some location services - like Facebook Places - let you choose which of your online contacts can see your location updates.
It’s also useful to bear the following in mind:
- If you share your physical location with all your online friends (some of whom you might not have met in person), you could be contacted in real life by strangers
- If you share where you are, you’re also sharing where you are not – online location updates (eg on Twitter) have been highlighted by a site called PleaseRobMe.com as a means of burglars finding out when homes are empty, for example
- Local businesses that use location information could target you with adverts
It’s therefore crucial that you understand what location services are and how you can customise the privacy settings many have built in to them.
Where can I find more information?