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Listed below are comments made by StuartBertram between Monday, 14th July 2008 and Monday, 14th July 2008.

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Location, location, location 09:25am on 14 Jul 2008 It's interesting to see that so far most of the applications the commenters have suggested have been push apps: send your location to a friend, send your location to a meeting attendee, adding specific locations to a report of an incident/issue on the roads, etc.

Even some of the examples mentioned in the Twitter messages aren't too bad, depending on implementation. Attaching location to content? Sensible enough if it is done by a purposeful action, but not always necessary and sometimes excessively revealing. Finding local gigs and cinema listings? Again, sensible, but best done by having your phone (or other mobile device) populate the field for you. Same with "are my friends near-by" - best if done as a "are any friends in..." that can be auto-populated (because what about the situation where you are in Bolton and want to know who is in Manchester before you head off?)

I'm 23, but I'd still not trust the majority of the uses the companies would want to put this to. Having the store itself have a short-range transmitter that passively pushes an offer to my phone without being able to identify who it pushed it to wouldn't be too bad, but phoning home to pull data about a variety of things that advertisers want you to know about is too invasive. That, plus you have little/no control over the data transfer and the incurred costs (which would be huge on PAYG!)

To all those who are happy to have their every movement published to some service: I look forward to the day that your insurance goes up because criminals have found it's a wonderful way to find people who are away from their home.

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