Is there value to be added to location data?

Last night I was involved in a brief Twitter conversation with the inimitable Tony Fish, author of “My Digital Footprint” about mobile operators adding value to location data.  Personally I don’t see any (intrinsic) value in location data, that horse bolted years back (totally disrupting Alcatel et al’s monopoly at the switch level for location data).  The value in location data come from what you do with the data.  Anyway…

Tony’s thinking raised the question over placing delay on location data as a privacy guard.  His blog post on the subject is over here.  I have taken the liberty of posting my response here and on his blog.

Hey Tony

I can totally see where you are coming from but a couple of points if I may;

The notion of applying a “false” location to things is of course technically feasible but to be caught deliberately falsifying one’s location would probably do one’s reputation more harm than any good it might achieve.  Far better to merely omit the location data in the first place than try to put people of the scent as it were.

I don’t want the operator to take control of my location.  Firstly if one lives in a low signal area or indeed a highly built up and populated (read cell overloaded) area then the operator’s true understanding of one’s location is actually pretty coarse.  Sure they could get all clever and pull timing data from each cell and trilaterate back at a central point BUT as you have already stated the API is silly expensive – it’s already been disrupted by the handset itself.

Secondly, and you’ve eluded to the privacy enhancing nature of such a service, even with a user-pays service provided by an operator I would have little faith that my location data would not be aggregated and mined for their own purposes.  Far better to leave the collection, aggregation and control with the user methinks.

So how would I approach this? Well…

Certainly the handset is the right place to gather the location information. Assisted GPS (aGPS) utilising any number of beacons from cell towers to wi-fi nodes to locate the phone is easily the most reliable method of getting an accurate location.  It’s what you do with it next that counts.

If one looks at the Fire Eagle service from Yahoo! (one of the first true identity information brokerage services IMO)  it allows one to post and update an accurate location from any number of applications.  Then the user is able to decide to which location gobbling services that location is shared and more importantly to which degree of accuracy is exposed.  In fact Google Latitude does this fine:coarse sharing but to a far lesser degree.

From a single metre accurate location update to Fire Eagle it would be possible to see one location service getting your locale (as opposed to location) being at a City level when another service gets it down to the street.

That then brings me on to the notion of time-shifting or delayed location.  It would be entirely possible to build a service that sits as a layer on top of Fire Eagle (with permissions for fine grained access probably) and allows one to add delay (or even decay) to the outgoing location sharing.

However to me it would seem a feature so valuable (not in monetary terms but in usability) that it would be far better baked straight in to Fire Eagle.

I’m certain this conversation has been had before however it seems to have sunk back into the murky waters of location based services as they all vie for superiority and control of the user’s data.  To that end I tip my hat and thank you for bringing it up again.

Was Vodafone’s PAYG Outage in Bad Faith?

Not being a VF UK user I was a little late to hear that apparently their PAYG topup mechanisms were out for the weekend – probably the busiest period of the week for PAYG users.

Mobile operators are not known for being the nicest of fairest of companies to deal with I know but given the ubiquity and essentialness of their service in modern life it does seem a little poor on VF’s part to not allow normally willing paying customers just to utilise the network whilst VF fanny around with their billing systems.

Do 0870 numbers harm engagement?

Since getting back to the UK the prevalence of premium rate telephone numbers for not only technical support but also straight customer service has really shocked me.  Pretty well every company utilises an 0870, 0844, 0845 (et al) number for some part of their operation.

I can well understand the idea of using an easily remembered single number for the whole country (say 0845…) – it makes printing, advertising and such so much easier.  But I’m sure some marketing boffin at British Telecom decided sometime in the early naughties that offering up a method for monetising the contact with customers businesses live and die by was a better reason than that of making peoples lives easier.  It all seems to have gotten a little silly.

Does forcing the customer/user to pay for something as simple as obtaining a brochure or sign up for a service present an adoption barrier or harm engagement?

As I’ve been getting on with stuff this morning two examples laid themselves before me.

HM Customs and Revenue.  My step-father has spent over an hour on hold with various departments trying to sort out something or another.  The cost of that call was born solely by him.  Yup even the UK government utilises non-localised numbers for contact – they have a plethora of 0845s and even a few 0870s knocking around.

According to research by Which?, the Government’s Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency raised almost £2.5m from its 0870 numbers in 2006 and they were by no means the only agency raking in 7 figure revenues from premium calls!

Three UK.  Last week I was the lucky and grateful receiver of a free 3G broadband dongle from the operator.  It was part of a giveaway designed to drive adoption.  It came with no credit and limited instruction on installation or more to the point troubleshooting.  It simply did not work on my Windows 7 netbook – strange and curious errors abounded and all I was trying to do was connect to My3 (the customer portal) so I could obtain some credit.  The instructions, such as they were, had a free call number from my mobile for help but when I called it they thanked me for my custom and promptly handed over an 0870 number for support troubleshooting the installation.

Before I had even had the chance to spend money with 3UK they were demanding I paid for help with a product which patently didn’t work as advertised.  As it ended up the community came to the rescue as the resulting 25 minute call with 3UK support achieved nothing of use.

The slightly cynical side of me suspects that in a era of business where CRM is still deemed the right approach to talking to customers (rather than with) that many of those businesses using user-pays telephone contact are holding those customers on the phone waiting to bolster otherwise flagging revenues.  I’d love to hear from anyone with call centre inside knowledge – either way.

Having had a quick look around the web it appears that Ofcom are already launching an investigation into 0870 numbers later in 2009

In the meantime make use of SayNoTo0870.Com and find yourself the most appropriate number for your use.