You are probably thinking of rule-based personalization, where someone decides in advance what's appropriate for you when you are in an area.

What Nathan Eagle does is use past behavior of others and you to predict what you will do in a new location.  If the system can't store the location of others, then it has no "model" to figure out what you will do when behaving similarly.  Furthermore, if it can't save your past behavior, a system cannot build a model of your personality to leverage and the phone must transmit your whole behavioral history to the system every time it wants to predict for you.  In a sense, this is even more risky because now you must worry about things intercepting the data.

Europe, as far as I know, has done very little research in this area of predictive geographic modeling.  I think it is because of this law.

It is fine to make such a decision, but it has tradeoffs that people may have failed to consider.  And it is a truism that Europe is especially sensitive to privacy issues in the area of business (not so much if Big Brother--aka the government--is watching).  The US is much more permissive to corporations, and there are downsides to that as well.

Dan R. Greening, Ph.D.,  CEO BigTribe Corporation,  http://dan.greening.name/contact.htm



On Jun 29, 2006, at 12:23 PM, Kjetil Kjernsmo wrote:

On Thursday 29 June 2006 12:39, Dan R. Greening wrote:
When last I checked, EU law precludes  
things like geography-based personalization, like the stuff Nathan  
Eagle does, because you cannot store location-tracking information  
with user-identification in the EU ... like EVER... even if you  
inform the consumer.  A whole class of applications is now verboten  
there.

I can't really agree. That you cannot _store_ the location of a user 
doesn't mean that you cannot use it if the user willingly provides it 
to you. So, the way to do this is that the user's device itself knows 
its location (by a built-in GPS, being in range of bluetooth devices 
with an ID, or something). If the user wants geography-based 
personalisation, the user agent communicates the necessary data to the 
provider, the provider acts upon it, but doesn't store it.

That's the general privacy-friendly approach to things, I feel. Fact is, 
my little phone has 42 MB of non-volatile memory, which can contain all 
information I would willingly share with anyone (for the lifetime of 
the phone), and I bring it along everywhere. It can communicate over 
GPRS over long range or Bluetooth over short range. So, everything is 
there, ask me politely to share it and let me know how it will be 
useful to me, and I'll give you the information (possibly by some 
automated method). 

Well, I'm sort of a transparency guy too, but I'd really like to try 
this approach out first.

Cheers,

Kjetil
-- 
Kjetil Kjernsmo
Programmer / Astrophysicist / Ski-orienteer / Orienteer / Mountaineer
Homepage: http://www.kjetil.kjernsmo.net/     OpenPGP KeyID: 6A6A0BBC
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