Who's Watching You Now?

Location-based applications and services are emerging at a pace that's likely to accelerate over the next few years. Such services offer everything from consumer convenience to life-saving security. All these scenarios involve the transmission of location information over an IP network, and all raise significant issues about that information's privacy, security, and control. The IETF's Geographic Location/Privacy working group (Geopriv WG) has created a set of standards for sending location information coupled with privacy rules over the Internet. The standards call for the creation of location objects (LOs), which contain a location along with a limited set of rules that can point to an external set of more complex rules, if necessary. In development over the past few years, Geopriv is approaching an initial completion stage and appears likely to be implemented in several key technologies