By December 31, 2005, all mobile phone providers in the US will be required to provide the location of a 911 caller within 50-100 meters. Since location-aware services need to be implemented for E911 anyway, mobile phone providers are going to add some new location based services. This will give you the ability to see where your friends are, recieve instant messages from your favorite stores, etc.
AT&T has had it’s “Find Friends” service available on mMode for a while now. Of course Lucent has developed the Privacy-Conscious Personalization framework that will allow you to set permissions on location based services for only the things you want to use, so as to protect your privacy.
I think Location Based Services are going to be really great. I would love to be able to see if there’s alot of traffic on my intended driving route. I’m not so sure I’d want my friends to always be able to see my location, but that would definitely be useful to turn on when meeting somewhere.
Originally published on Pocketnow on February 2, 2004. More Smartphone News articles from the Pocketnow archive.