LBS -> Location database and consequences

Lisa Bowman (1999) rightly predicted that, "The control of GPS tracking information will be a significant public policy issue several years from now,”

One year later, Daniel R. Sovocool (2000) writes about a court order in Washington that states that in a murder case the police issued a warrant to search the suspect’s car and later installed a GPS device in the car to record his movements. In yet another case the judge ruled that the police have the right to install GPS device to track and store the movements of the suspects even without issuing a warrant. This ruling created a stir among the privacy experts.

The availability of LBS gives rise to collection of private information. For example the tracking service stores the location of the person in 

“The privacy-destroying consequences of cell phone tracking increase dramatically when movement is are archived. It is one thing to allow police to use the data to track a fugitive in real time. It is another thing to archive the data, perhaps even in perpetuity, in case police or others wish to reconstruct someone's movements. In 1997, a Swiss newspaper revealed that a local phone company kept information recording the movement of one million subscribers, accurate to within a few hundred meters, and that the data was stored for more than six months.” (Michael Froomkin, 2000)