New location-tracking services may be a ‘killer app’ at academic conferences, if scholars don’t mind some invasion of privacy
Norman M. Sadeh, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, knows exactly where his research assistants are. He can just pop open his laptop and see their locations on a Google map, represented as push-pin-like icons scattered around the campus. And his colleagues can track him, too — well, at least during weekdays when he’s in town.
Mr. Sadeh’s research focuses on whether location-tracking services can be run in a way that doesn’t creep people out. College campuses are, in many ways, ideal settings for the technology. Students and professors are highly mobile, and they often want to find partners for study groups, meetings, or trips to the bar. I recently visited Mr. Sadeh’s lab to see a demonstration of a system his team developed, and to get a sense of how college life might change if these tools catch on.
The technology to track your every move is already here. Google announced a service just this month called Latitude, which uses information from your cellphone or from your laptop’s Internet connection to home in on your location and let you share it with friends. A company called Loopt, started by a Stanford undergraduate who put his studies on hold to seek his high-tech fortune, unveiled a similar friend-tracking service back in 2006 and announced new versions for the iPhone and other popular cellphones last year. There are other competitors, too. Most of the services are free, and you can download them right now.
But although there has been plenty of press coverage — and a TV advertisement for the iPhone showing someone finding a lunch companion using Loopt — none of these buddy trackers have found a following beyond the hard-core-geek crowd. Do you know anyone using them? I mean, beyond signing up once to see what they’re like? Probably not, and Mr. Sadeh thinks he knows why.
The problem with most of the location trackers on the market is that they don’t give people enough control over who can see them, and under what conditions, Mr. Sadeh says. He’s got data to back up his theory: His group has been experimenting for years with different privacy settings and user reactions.
Most of his test subjects started out reluctant to share their every move, even with friends. But users generally warmed to the system after they found the “hide my location” button for when they wanted to drop off the map. And people used the system, called Locaccino, even more after the research team allowed new options, including a setting that lets friends track you only when you’re on the campus or within some set geographic area. The idea is to prevent users from accidentally broadcasting their whereabouts, which could lead to embarrassment or might even aid stalkers.
One of the features Mr. Sadeh is most proud of in his own system is called “Who’s Viewed Me,” which, as the name suggests, lists every moment in the recent past when another user on the system saw your location. It’s not the kind of thing that Google or Loopt have offered — perhaps out of fear that such data might scare people off. But the Carnegie Mellon researchers say it helps users fine-tune their settings and feel at ease with the service.
Sam Altman, the student founder of Loopt, disagreed. In an interview last week, he said that the company had found that offering too many settings confuses users, and he argued that people are more open to the idea of location sharing than they were just two years ago. That said, the company is still trying to figure out what works best, and he said a few privacy settings would be added to Loopt in the next few months.
Why Track?
Mr. Sadeh says his tracking service has come in handy during lab meetings, when, inevitably, someone is late. The professor can see if the tardy researcher is on the way or so far away that the team might as well get started.
But the killer application of location tracking for professors could be during academic conferences. If people shared their locations during an event, finding the most interesting colleagues to go to lunch with would get a whole lot easier.
Students, meanwhile, not only like to find out who’s nearby, but also generally have more open attitudes about privacy than their professors do. Students have been the first to adopt services like Facebook and Twitter, which let people frequently share updates as mundane as “just got to the library.”
I was curious to talk to a student experimenting with Mr. Sadeh’s service, so we literally tracked one down. Patrick Kelley is a master’s-degree student working with Mr. Sadeh, and on a recent Monday afternoon the system showed his location as 8403 Wean Hall. “My best guess is that he’s meeting with a professor,” said Mr. Sadeh. It was about a five-minute walk from Mr. Sadeh’s office, so we headed over for a surprise visit.
“Interesting — I’ve never been here,” said Mr. Sadeh as we reached the designated room. It appeared to be a physics laboratory, and a sign on the door read: “Caution: Radioactive Material.” I was relieved to find the door locked tight. Odds were that Mr. Kelley wasn’t in there.
So we tried an older technology — Mr. Sadeh dialed him on his cellphone. “Hi, Patrick, how are you?” he said, explaining our attempt to track him down. “Did I catch you at a bad time?”
It turns out that Mr. Kelley was just three doors away, in a professor’s office, helping to write an exam for the next day. The tracking technology obviously isn’t perfect, though in this case it got us within about 50 feet of our target.
I asked the student if he found it creepy that someone could find him like this.
“Oh, it’s definitely creepy,” he replied, “but, you know, you find it’s something you get used to.” He added that most people requesting his location have some reason to do so that he’s OK with. “If somebody’s looking for me at 2 in the morning, maybe they have a really good reason. Maybe something happened. Maybe they need me to come help them out or something. And so I think the benefits really do outweigh the risks.”
How Much Is Too Much?
“Helicopter parents” will certainly love this technology. That’s the phrase used by many college administrators to describe hyper-involved parents who constantly check up on their kids. Assuming that students allow it, parents can now simply look to see whether or not Johnny went to class on time.
Alex Jarvis, a junior at Central Connecticut State University, said he let his mother track him using Google’s Latitude when he went to visit friends in Boston this month. “I said, ‘Mom, all you have to do is jiggle the mouse so you can see where I am and that I’m not dead,’” he said. He planned to change the settings later: “I’m not going to let her always know.”
Mr. Jarvis said that such services haven’t caught on yet at his university — he only knows a few other people who have tried one. He says he is excited about the possibilities for the technology to, say, let people at a concert find others nearby who have similar interests. But he said the main reason people on the campus don’t use the tools is that they don’t really see the point.
After trying friend-finding services myself, the benefits so far seem marginal. In part that’s because few people are signed up. Right now using Latitude or Loopt is like being the first person you know to get an e-mail account. You can imagine it will be great later on, when there’s someone to talk to.
New Services on the Horizon
There are, of course, plenty of applications for location tracking beyond just broadcasting your location to friends. Now that your cellphone knows where you are, services are popping up to help you find nearby restaurants or even educational information about your surroundings.
A new report by Educause, the higher-education technology group, identified location tagging as one of the top technology trends to watch in the next two to three years.
Businesses have long dreamed of using location tracking to beam advertising — text-messaging coupons to someone as they walk past a store, for instance. That desire is driving investment in services like Google Latitude, but as a consumer it’s hard to get excited about what sounds like a new form of junk mail.
It may soon be handy for your cellphone and laptop to know where you are — but not because they will broadcast that spot to friends. For now, with the downside of buddy-trackers obvious and the benefits hard to explain, it may be a long time before most people on college campuses are willing to put themselves on the map.
College 2.0 explores how new technologies are changing colleges. Please send ideas to jeff.young@chronicle.com.
http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 55, Issue 25, Page A15
