“Mobile location is no threat to privacy”

20 Sep 2001 at 14:40 GMT Timo Poropudas

Location based mobile services are seen as a huge threat to people’s privacy. Many privacy advocates have sought new legislation against this invasion. They, and quite often also general public, legislators and to some extent media, subscribe to a view that the ability to know where person, or person’s mobile phone, is at any moment, strips the vestiges of personal privacy from modern day society.

Jari Perko, a lawyer with Telia Mobile, disagrees. He does not dispute that a technical ability to follow people exists and is becoming more common, but he does not see this as a credible threat.

Before moving to Telia Mobile, Perko spent five years with the Finnish ministry of communications. Before that he work for Ficom, the Finnish ISP’s interest organization. With that background he has an authority to say that the ability to follow people’s lives, collect information of their behaviour on the Internet or to see where their cellular phones are, has existed for years. Perko was speaking on Thursday in Espoo where the Communications Ministry was introducing its development program for mobile services.

“There are rules that protect us from unwanted snooping or illegal gathering of information. Those who break the rules, break the law. And setting up tighter regulations will not protect us from illegal surveillance,” Perko claims. He sees no serious problems in today’s privacy protection and he does not anticipate any in the location based mobile services.

Perko points out that there are two ways to use location information. The continuous surveillance is used to track the movements of truck fleet drivers, for instance. There might problems in turning off the surveillance when a truck driver quits at the end of the day, but there are also various network nodes where the organization can “loose” the driver’s free-time location information.

On-demand location information always needs the end users permission to collect and use location information. The case in point is an emergency call where the caller fervently wishes to be located as accurately as possible. Some other location-based services require an overt action by a phone user. “Where am I” request via SMS to location service provider, means giving a permission to pick up and use the location coordinates.

Sending commercial push messages without the expressed permission from the phone owner is prohibited by consumer protection regulations, no matter that the consumer happens to be just in the target area of the advertiser.

And “where is my friend, or spouse” type of requests cannot be fulfilled by the wireless operator without the consent of the sought person. Mobile phone owner has had a possibility to send or not to send his phone number to the phone he is trying reach. The receiving phone cannot show who or which number is calling if it never receives the information. Cellular users need an ability to control their location information the same way.

Perko knows on no serious mobile privacy violations in Finland or in other countries. He thinks the general laws of society are enough to handle any possible problems arising in this area. If it nor broken, don’t fix, is his attitude. And he takes issue with EU-legislators and administrators that are all too ready create new, technology-based regulations when everyone should understand that it is in the interest of good business practices to protect consumers from unwanted intrusions.