Chapter 19

Location-aware technologies

Control and privacy in hybrid spaces

Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith

Location-aware mobile technologies interface¹ people’s relationships to public space by allowing individuals to retrieve place-specific digital information and connect to nearby people depending on their relative location in physical space. The devices’ awareness of physical location is accomplished via triangulation of radio waves, WiFi, or Global Positioning Systems (GPS). Whereas mobile phones were initially studied as technologies that helped people withdraw from their physical surroundings (Geser 2004, Gergen 2002, Puro 2002), it is now evident that one of the major characteristics of mobile (smart) phones is their ability to allow for diverse types of connections to local spaces and local people² (de Souza e Silva and Sutko 2009, Gordon and de Souza e Silva 2011, Humphreys 2007). For example, location-based social network (LBSN) software such as Foursquare and Brightkite allow users to visualize the physical location of their friends on their mobile phone screen (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2010a). Likewise, location-based advertising (LBA) can now deliver coupons whenever a user is within a certain distance of specific stores, and geotagging applications such as WikiMe and GeoGraffitti allow individuals to access and upload information that is place specific.

Interacting with location-specific information transforms the city into a hybrid space where the physical and the digital merge through the social use of mobile interfaces (de Souza e Silva 2006). Furthermore, because users have the ability to customize the types of information they are willing to interact with (which friends they would like to see, which coupons they want to receive, what information they want to access), we suggest that individuals might use these devices to personalize and control their experiences of public spaces. These technologies are thus used as types of filters (i.e., interfaces) that allow people to select the information they access about the spaces they move through.

The ability to control shared spaces did not emerge with location-aware technologies. Other mobile media, such as the book and the iPod, help individuals engage with the public on their own terms. For instance, reading a book on a crowded train allows individuals to partially control their experience of space by focusing on the narrative of the book and pay selective attention to their physical surroundings (Schivelbusch 1986). The same goes for auditory media such as the iPod or the Walkman: by adding an auditory layer to public spaces users are able to control the otherwise “chaotic” perception of urban spaces (Bull 2000, Bull 2007, Hosokawa 1984). While location-aware technologies do share many similarities with these other forms of mobile media, especially the perceived merging of borders between public and private spaces, three major differences make them unique, and therefore an important area of study: (1) the ability to personalize and filter digital information from their surrounding space, (2) the ability to interact with location-based information that is geographically “attached” to the public space, and (3) the privacy concerns associated with the public sharing of location.

In this chapter, we address these issues by focusing on how location-aware mobile devices interface users’ interactions with public spaces by helping them to control and personalize these spaces, therefore challenging established conceptions of public and private. We use examples of other mobile portable media, such as the book, the Walkman, and the iPod, to acknowledge that these issues did not emerge with location-aware technologies.³ But we then demonstrate that location-aware technologies differ from other types of mobile media due to their ability to allow users to locate information and people in their surrounding space and the corresponding privacy concerns.

Ultimately, we argue that the way we experience urban spaces is often influenced by the material interfaces that mediate our relationships with them – in this case, mobile technologies. This raises interesting questions of individual agency and how subjects are positioned in the larger heterogeneous networks of people, technologies, and discursive formations that constitute any public space. While a full development of our perspective is beyond the scope of this chapter,⁴ it is important to note that we recognize mobile technologies as both shaping and being shaped by larger societal trends (Castells 2000, Deleuze and Guattari 1987, Hayles 1999, Latour 2005, Turkle 1995). In this chapter, we are interested in the experience of the individual. Urban scholars, ranging from Georg Simmel (1950) to Richard Sennett (1977), have written extensively on how individuals experience mobility in urban spaces, arguing that with the growth of urban areas and the parallel growth in individualism, individuals have developed new ways of interacting in public spaces. Building on Simmel and Sennett, we argue that to understand how people experience and negotiate urban spaces, we also need to analyze the material characteristics of mobile interfaces that accompany users while they move through these spaces. These interfaces often influence not only how users interact with physical spaces, but also how people socialize in the city.

Reading on the train, listening on the street

More than a century ago, Simmel (1950) discussed the growth of urban centers and the overstimulation of senses as a byproduct of the increasing mobility of the subject, the invention of electric light, crowded streets and boulevards, and imminent interactions with strangers. For Simmel, the city was incomprehensible in its unfiltered form; consequently, it was necessary to develop a type of mental reserve to parse out various social situations from the aural and visual chaos of the urban street. He called this mental reserve a blasé attitude, which can be understood as a psychological filter through which the metropolitan resident interacted with the city space (Simmel 1950, p. 415). The blasé attitude was a way of (dis)engaging with public space characterized by a rational and calculating reserve. By being mentally able to engage and disengage with the public space around them, metropolitan individuals developed a personalized way of controlling the apparent chaos of urban life, indispensable for the survival in the city.

For at least two centuries, individuals have also used mobile media, such as books, newspapers, Walkmen, iPods, and mobile phones, as a sort of technologically enabled blasé attitude. These media are generally framed as “removing” users from public spaces (Gergen 2002, Geser 2004, Puro 2002, Uzzell 2008); however, this perceived “disconnection” from one’s physical surroundings can actually be seen as a way of interacting with public space and exerting a personalized form of control over the apparent chaos of the public setting. The book is an early example of how people managed and controlled their experience of public space. Reading a book in a crowded place, such as a bus or a park, allows the reader to divert her attention from the physical surroundings, selecting when and how to interact with that space. We can see a historical example of how people do so by briefly discussing the early days of railway travel.

With the development of the railway in the early 19th century, book publishers began publishing smaller, more portable books for travel (Manguel 1997). These early types of portable media were known as railway literature, and soon the sight of people reading became commonplace on trains. Because of the social setting of the train that positioned strangers in a U-shaped compartment, train travelers felt the need to filter each other’s presence, and reading fulfilled the desire to manage the uncomfortable social situation of the train compartment. Schivelbusch (1986) notes that the lower classes did not read in trains. Besides their lower levels of literacy, wagons in the third and fourth classes were not U-shaped. This is interesting because it shows how the use of technology in public space is directly associated with that space’s configuration. Additionally, Schivelbusch acknowledges that the emergence of the habit of reading in trains is related to the increasing stimuli associated to the train travel (vs. the slower mode of horse-back travel) in which passengers had to interact with a greater number of objects and persons. So, they needed the book as an interface to that space. But the habit of reading was not only a consequence of the construction of space; it also influenced passengers’ experience of the train compartment. The narrative of the novel becomes part of one’s experience of space, not by withdrawing the reader from the space, but as a material filter used to control one’s interaction with the public. Individuals may be thrown into a train compartment, just as Simmel’s urbanites were thrown into the chaos of the street, but they can control randomness by using the book to impart a certain kind of order.

Similar to the book, the Walkman was met with derision by those who feared its ability to withdraw users from public spaces and lead to new types of social atomization (du Gay et al. 1997, Hosokawa 1984). Even scholars who did not bemoan Walkman use still often conceptualized it as a tool individuals used to withdraw from public space. For Hosokawa (1984), the ability to choose the soundtrack through which one experiences spaces can isolate the listener from contact with other people in the vicinity, turning the physical environment into a background to the listener’s thoughts. Similarly, discussing interviews with Walkman users, Bull (2000) suggests that the Walkman often had a major effect on people’s perception of their surroundings by withdrawing them from their geographical space. He argued that the Walkman use allowed individuals to partially ignore the space they traveled by imparting a personalized “soundscape” on the public space. Bull’s (2007) subsequent interviews with iPod users suggested much of the same interaction with public spaces as his interviews with Walkman users, including a sense of occupying a personalized “soundscape” and not always being aware of the space being traversed. As with the Walkman, iPod users still put on headphones and soundtrack their space, but iPods give users greater control over how they interact with their surroundings. Because of their memory and processing power, iPods let people customize their music choice to match their space.

Many of the issues raised by the widespread use of Walkmen and iPods as portable technologies are also echoed in early mobile phone studies. Mobile phones have also been regarded as withdrawing users from their physical surroundings (Gergen 2002, Geser 2004, Puro 2002).⁵ Matsuda (2005) calls this phenomenon “selective sociality,” and Habuchi (2005) describes it as “telecocooning.” However, that mobiles – and the other portable media discussed above – do not necessarily remove people from physical space. Rather, they provide users with a filter that helps them select and control with whom and what they want to interact with in public spaces. We see these technologies as interfaces that mediate users’ interactions with public spaces. Ultimately, they function similarly to Simmel’s blasé attitude, by which the metropolitan man pays attention to some aspects of public spaces but ignores others. Individuals use these personal media as ways of controlling their interactions with their surrounding space, not necessarily by withdrawing from it.

Controlling and managing public spaces has often been perceived as an invasion of the public by the private (Geser 2004, Fortunati 2002). Although public and private are socially and culturally defined entities, although their boundaries have shifted through history, and although both have frequently ingressed upon one another, the fact that we are able to talk about “public” and “private” means there are at least some general conceptions that define them as both different from and complementary to each other. If public spaces are perceived as spaces individuals have little control over, then private spaces are secluded spaces where individuals can reorganize and produce more through their own agency. Mobile media are claimed to “privatize” public spaces because they give users a feeling of control and familiarity that generally belongs to private spaces. By reading a book, or listening to music in public, users feel in control over their physical surroundings and therefore create their own personal spaces in public settings (Bull 2001, Manguel 1997, Sterne 2003). Now we are witnessing the emergence of yet another type of personal mobile media: location-aware mobile technologies.

Location-aware mobile technologies

Like earlier forms of mobile media, location-aware mobile technologies can be conceptualized as interfaces that individuals use to control their interactions with public space. They are, however, intrinsically different from the previously analyzed mobile media. All the above-mentioned technologies manage users’ interactions with public spaces by introducing an external code that does not belong to it. Although these technologies reconfigure their users’ sense of place by focusing their attention elsewhere, whether it is the narrative of a novel or the beat of a favorite song, neither of these are place dependent. For example, a book’s narrative is not necessarily about the place where it is being read; the voice of a cell phone conversation generally comes from elsewhere; and the iPod’s songs are loaded independent of location. Conversely, location-aware devices allow for what may be a reconnection to physical space because the information users access depends on their physical location. For example, a user equipped with a GPSenabled mobile phone in Copacabana beach who opens the application Foursquare is able to see many locations (restaurants, bars, venues) that are nearby. Similarly, if she decides to tweet about Copacabana, that piece of information can be coded with the lat/long (latitude/longitude) geographical coordinates of that place, which will then appear to anyone else standing in Copacabana searching for people tweeting nearby. Location-based services (LBS), especially LBA, deliver coupons and offers to users depending on their location in physical space. In addition, LBSN applications such as Loopt, Foursquare, GoWalla, and Whrll allow users to visualize the location of nearby friends or other people using the application on a map on their mobile phone screen.

There are three important implications of the use of location-aware technologies in public spaces that are not present with other forms of nonlocative mobile media⁶ discussed above. First, location-aware mobile technologies allow users to interact with previously existing local information, for example, by accessing a Wikipedia article about a local facility. Second, they allow users to create local information that might be shared with others in the vicinity, as in the case of writing a review about a local restaurant and attaching lat/long coordinates to it. Finally, and most importantly for our argument, they enable users to select the types of information with which they want to interact from the physical surrounding space. For example, if a LooptMix user is looking for graduate students interested in literature and independent film, she can set her preferences to find people in her environment who are graduate students who like literature and independent films. She is then able to see on her mobile phone screen graphic representations of everyone around her who uses LooptMix, attends graduate school, and likes literature and independent film. Conversely, she might not be aware of other graduate students who like videogames and soccer. So, if Simmel’s blasé attitude worked as a psychological filter to public spaces, location-aware technology literally selects from that space the people and sites with which users would like to interact. This personalized social space, interfaced through the mobile phone, shows only other nearby people and information that matches the user’s interests.

Like other types of mobile media, location-aware mobile technologies also challenge the established borders between what is private and what is public. Gordon (2009, p. 26) suggests that with location-aware mobile technologies, “private space is no longer defined solely as control over a geographic domain; it is control over the access and production of data within flexible information flows.” The forms of “privatization” or control over public spaces that emerge with location-aware technologies are more powerful and may have more long-lasting consequences than the changes brought about by other forms of mobile media. People without the right technologies will not be able to access the same type of digital information that now permeates physical spaces in the form of the location of friends, restaurant reviews, historical information about places, advertising coupons, and so on; therefore, individuals who use these services will increasingly shape their experiences of public spaces through the preferences and settings on their location-aware applications.

Public spaces embedded with location-specific information follow a logic similar to the fairly recent development of personalized online spaces found all over the Internet. Gordon (2010) calls these personalized digital spaces “digital possessives.” Digital possessives can be seen most obviously in the use of the “my” pronoun online. My Facebook page is “my” profile. My search preferences are “my” preferences. With LBS, this logic of personalized digital space has moved into the public spaces of the city. By setting preferences with different LBS, users interact with a personalized visualization of the city through their mobile phones. The restaurants that appear when they search for geotagged recommendations in close proximity to their location can be set to match their preferences. They can also use LBSNs to visually map the location of their friends, and in a way. So “my” public space becomes different than other people’s experience of public space. Therefore, people who do not appear on the map may become a less important part of that space from the user’s perspective than those who do.

These new methods of filtering public space will have consequences not only for people who use location-aware technology, but also for people who do not have access to these technologies. They might lead to a type of differential space, where only those who own the technology are able to browse and access location-specific information (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2010b). So, two people might be seating side-by-side on a bus but have a substantially different experience of the same physical space. However, different experiences of space do not necessarily lead to their disintegration, as so often was feared by mobile communication scholars (Hampton et al. 2009, Wellman 2002). On the contrary, these different experiences comprise a new way of understanding public space. Gordon and de Souza e Silva (2011) call these new spatial formations net-localities:

As a consequence, the production of net-localities influences both users of the technology and those unaware of the digital information present in the space. For example, if a coffee shop starts sending all its discount coupons through LBA, those who do not have a location-aware phone will no longer be able to get discounts. Or if friends increasingly coordinate through LBSNs, those who do not belong to the network will also miss out social events. What we are witnessing, thus, is the emergence of a new type of public space that is not only composed by face-to-face interactions, but also includes remote users, and digital information “attached” to places. This new configuration of public space is increasingly personalizable through users’ preferences. LBS literally draw from the digital information embedded within physical space, and to do so, the services filter out information not of interest to the user. The mobile phone becomes the interface with which to negotiate the spaces of the city, enabling users to manipulate and personalize them.

Paradoxically, these same technologies that allow for increased control over public spaces can also contribute to a sense of powerlessness in regards to privacy. While location-aware technologies allow users increasingly to personalize and control their surroundings, an immediate consequence of being able to locate people and things is that one can also be located. The individual’s location is materialized on the mobile screen and shared with others. The possibility of having one’s location information disclosed leads to serious concerns about privacy, especially when the person being located has no control over who owns that location information. Because locationaware technologies basically allow other parties to know one’s location, there is a perceived invasion of privacy related to disclosing one’s personal location – which has traditionally been considered private information (Monmonier 2002).

In a former study, we have identified two primary types of privacy concerns that arise with the use of LBS: collateral surveillance (from other users) and top-down surveillance (from the government and corporations) (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2010a). The first type of surveillance occurs mostly among users of LBSNs. As we have showed elsewhere, popular press outlets have repeatedly warned LBSNs users about the dangers of stalking correlated to the public sharing of location (ibid.). Another type of privacy concern arises when people fear that the government and corporations are accessing individuals’ location information without customers’ prior consent. This is very common in the case of LBA. LBA is already one of the major uses of location information, and it has been identified as a key piece of future advertising models (Clifford 2009). The main perceived problem with LBA is that LBS privacy policies are generally unclear about with whom they will share users’ location information (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2010b). As a consequence, many users sign up for one service, but end up receiving LBA from other companies that were not authorized to access their location. Other serious issues of locational privacy are associated with governmental surveillance (Blumberg and Eckersley 2009). It is unclear how often or how easily mobile phone companies turn over individuals’ location history to governments, though evidence suggests it may be more often than many people think (Zetter 2009).

As we have seen through the recent controversies over Facebook’s changing privacy policies, many people have little understanding of how their information is being used or with whom it is shared. We can expect to see the same phenomenon arise with LBS, which often have opaque privacy policies (de Souza e Silva and Frith 2010b). The sense of control users experience when moving through space can quickly turn into a feeling of helplessness when they are reminded – whether by an individual who finds them through an LBSN or a particularly accurate LBA – that they do not always control their locational information. The personalized spaces carved out through users’ preferences can become alarmingly public when they lose control over their personal information.

Conclusion

Mobile technologies can be understood as technologies of control. We read, listen to music, and talk on mobile phones in an attempt to control our experience of space. Mobile media, such as the book and the Walkman, already helped users to control and manage their interactions with public spaces. The use of these technologies has frequently raised issues about the private invading the public. In this chapter, we argued that location-aware mobile devices mark a distinct change in issues of personalization and the divide between private and public. Other mobile technologies allowed individuals to control their experience of public space by introducing a code (text or audio) that was separate from that space. Conversely, location-aware mobile devices allow users to interact with the digital information embedded in that space, and thus individuals can further control how they manage their interactions with nearby people and information. By infusing physical spaces with digital information, the experience of those spaces can be manipulated through location-based applications. The implications of these changes are profound, not only for sociability in urban spaces, but also to how these spaces might be planned and constructed.

Urban planners will likely develop new types of spaces that are designed to be manipulated by LBS, as can already be seen in some ubiquitous computing environments (Greenfield 2006). Addressing these changes, communication and new media scholars ought to depart from traditional conceptualizations of public spaces, privacy, and surveillance in order to understand the paradox that emerges with the use of location-aware technologies: Users have simultaneously increased control over their surrounding physical spaces, but very little control over how their locational information is used by different service providers, including the potential for such information to be shared with other corporations, governments, and security agencies. Future studies should focus on how and why users willingly sacrifice privacy for convenience when they use LBS. More importantly, future studies should address the changing meaning of privacy and the new dichotomy public versus private spaces that emerges with location awareness.

Notes

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