Location-Sharing Applications

Where are you? When will reach the office? These questions can now be easily answered by location-sharing tools, such as Locaccino.

A location-sharing tool is software that can be installed on your laptop or cell phone and relays your location to others, just like chat software, such as MSN Messenger, wherein the availability of a user is broadcast to other users as soon as he or she logs in. If you have logged in to your Locaccino software on your cell phone or laptop then people can know your whereabouts. It shares your location with all the other users who are signed in.

Developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, the project will reveal people's privacy preferences in the context of a location-sharing application and what it takes to adequately capture them. Through the project, the researchers will work towards developing better tools for specifying and refining user preferences, as well as informing society and policy makers about the value and challenges associated with emerging social networking applications.

A number of other location-sharing applications exist, in addition to Locaccino, such as the following examples.

• Latitude:  Google's Latitude allows people to see where your friends are and what they are up to; quickly contact them with SMS, IM, or a phone call; and control what your location is and who gets to see it. Latitude is supported on a variety of cell phones.
• Ipoki:  Ipoki is another location-sharing application that can be used by Blackberry users. It connects to Google maps to give you directions to various places. You can also connect to other users who share their location.

Certain types of location-sharing software, such as Blip and Ipoki, arerestricted to Blackberry users only. So, other brands of cell phones are excluded, and you can only share your location only among other Blackberry users. These applications are not really popular among the masses.

This type of software generally provides pretty good security features, such as sharing your location only with approved friends. Although the common notion might be to reject location-sharing as an unwanted invasion of privacy, such software that caters to the privacy and security preferences of users might very well increase in popularity in the future.

References

• Locaccino  (Carnegie Mellon)