LBS and Passive Tracking
This essay is on LBS applications and passive tracking. It was originally published on July 1, 2005.
I know, the subject of this is a bit confusing. Let me explain what I mean.
As you may know I am big on location-based services (LBS), but not on tracking people; so don’t geofence me!
Some time ago I even wrote some guidelines for LBS developers that all mobility developers should read, and follow…
In any case, the ability to know where people are may be useful in certain applications. So how can we offer this “benefit” to our customers without violating the privacy of the end-users? Again, how can we do tracking in an honorable, rightful way?
Well, doing the right thing is not as hard as you might think and consist of:
- Following the guidelines mentioned above (and for your convenience, listed below)
-together with -
- Tracking people indirectly or passively!
Tracking people indirectly? But what is that?
Tracking people indirectly is the same as tracking people passively; instead of using techniques such as geofencing, or active monitoring where the location of individuals are transmitted and recorded continuously, your applications should only provide such location information during certain explicit situations.
Let me give an example…
…A workforce application provides work order dispatching and fulfillment. To maximize dispatching/fulfillment, the application uses LBS. What I advocate is that instead of capturing coordinates continuously, these coordinates are only captured for example when the employee gets to the destination, where the customer is. This will provide less sample-points (the last known location would be the location of the last visited customer), but enough for any application that needs location data to calculate who should go where next. Then from the reporting side, this location information would be available when querying for the status of the particular work order, and if querying the status of am employee, the last known location (the last customer’s location) would be displayed.
In summary, follow the Guidelines for LBS Developers, and use passive tracking…
ceo