*Useful* location-based services
Oct. 13th, 2010 10:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurOkay, I'll admit it: I'm a bit of a Luddite when it comes to the current fad for location-based services. Stuff like Foursquare strikes me as somewhere between intrusive and unsettling. If I lived in the city, I could just barely see using it, but out here in the 'burbs it seems like a mostly useless concept to me.
That said, it's clear that there is power in the idea, nicely illustrated in an article in yesterday's Times, talking about a new service to fight identity theft using location services. The idea is simple and elegant: they monitor your credit card and your cell phone, and send an alert if there's a transaction that doesn't line up, on the theory that somebody might have stolen your card number.
It seems far from necessarily perfect -- for example, online transactions wouldn't work with this, since the "location" of the transaction is often far away. So I'd worry about false alarms. But it's still clever, and I suspect could be used to very good effect as an early warning of a stolen credit card. Indeed, the banks themselves might be smart to offer this service themselves, since they often wind up on the hook for fraudulent transactions.
Others? I know of Bump, which uses exact positioning to set up connections between two cell phones so you can do app-to-app transactions, but not much else. Are there other location-based services (aside, obviously, from Maps) that are more than just toys?
That said, it's clear that there is power in the idea, nicely illustrated in an article in yesterday's Times, talking about a new service to fight identity theft using location services. The idea is simple and elegant: they monitor your credit card and your cell phone, and send an alert if there's a transaction that doesn't line up, on the theory that somebody might have stolen your card number.
It seems far from necessarily perfect -- for example, online transactions wouldn't work with this, since the "location" of the transaction is often far away. So I'd worry about false alarms. But it's still clever, and I suspect could be used to very good effect as an early warning of a stolen credit card. Indeed, the banks themselves might be smart to offer this service themselves, since they often wind up on the hook for fraudulent transactions.
Others? I know of Bump, which uses exact positioning to set up connections between two cell phones so you can do app-to-app transactions, but not much else. Are there other location-based services (aside, obviously, from Maps) that are more than just toys?