8

The Waning Distinction Between Private and Public

Net Locality and the Restructuring of Space

Adriana de Souza e Silva and Eric Gordon

The Waning Distinction Between Private and Public: Net Locality and the Restructuring of Space

As people become more comfortable with the ubiquity of networks in their lives, they become less comfortable with being disconnected.¹ Leaving the house without a cell phone or getting in the car without a GPS device might cause feelings of anxiety because it suggests a momentary disconnect from the network. This ubiquitous network is what Mark Andrejevic (2007) called the “digital enclosure.” The web is no longer something that people access intermittently and only from desktops – it is increasingly something to which people feel perpetually connected. Desktop and mobile devices are windows into this network, but they no longer define the edges of the network. This greatly expanded web, which stretches seamlessly from our screens to our streets, is what we call networked locality (net locality). Net locality is a means of describing a context for networked communication that is increasingly oriented around the location of the user. From location-aware mobile devices to web-based maps, a new level of attention to physical location is transforming user experiences of the web and the logic with which data are organized and distributed. In addition, net locality points to a different understanding of urban spaces, now permeated with networked interactions. As such, the awareness of net localities is critical for the very conceptualization of new media – from a focus on digital networks that operated outside the constraints of the physical world to practices that occur primarily in urban (hybrid) spaces (de Souza e Silva, 2006; Graham, 2004).

While there are significant benefits to this flexible and ubiquitous network, there are costs as well. People have increased access to data and information of all sorts. But in order to access data, people also need to disclose personal information. The disclosure of personal information per se is not a problem. However, often people do not know what kind of information about them is stored in databases or how it is being used. And the unauthorized use of personal information might lead to privacy breaches (Andrejevic, 2007; Solove, 2008). In the growing sector of location-based services, privacy issues are pronounced because data about a user's location are necessary for many location-based applications to function. For example, to use a location-based social network like Foursquare or even to take advantage of the Places feature on Facebook, it is necessary for users to disclose where they are. Even for those who enjoy the affordances of net locality, there is for some an accompanying anxiety with this form of personal disclosure. The act of sharing one's location information with cell phone providers invokes dystopian Orwellian fantasies of total surveillance.

But traditional metaphors of top-down surveillance are no longer adequate to address these concerns, because the fashion in which people are surveilled and in which they surveil others is rather circular in orientation (Solove, 2004). Disclosing personal location does compromise people's control over the use of their data; however, it also opens up the possibilities of controlling data to fortify the functionality of personal location. In other words, location-aware technologies typically enable users to exclude people and information that are not immediately relevant to their situation. So while the fear of outside intrusion upon personal space and information threatens to remove personal control in public spaces, the increased capacity for personal control over physical space through information filtering presents other problems associated with social exclusion (de Souza e Silva & Frith, 2010a). The increased personalization of space introduced by new technologies suggests new kinds of exclusionary practices and shifts in power relationships that might challenge how spaces are experienced and who has access to those experiences. Mobile devices and digital maps are filters that can exclude all but existing “friends” or social connections, and all but familiar spaces. As such, privacy and control are two sides of the same coin. Within net locality, controlling the distribution of one's location information is coupled with controlling the context and the corresponding affordances of sharing that information.

Net locality creates a paradox, where a personalized relationship to physical location simultaneously threatens and secures one's control of physical space. The borders between public and private spaces have shifted throughout human history, influenced by social and economic changes, and specifically by the development of new transportation and communication technologies (Arendt, 1958; Gant & Kiesler, 2002; Sheller & Urry, 2003). Likewise, the increasing use of location-aware technologies challenges us to question the traditional borders between what is considered public and what has been considered private, suggesting a new cultural understanding of the meaning of privacy.

When Photography Becomes Cartography

Initiatives like Google Maps and Google Street View are reminders that the mapping of the world is extensive, and consumers are gaining a certain amount of comfort with that mapping, even if it facilitates new and unprecedented forms of surveillance. But there have been important moments of resistance to this surveillance, and these moments suggest that there are unresolved tensions over the boundary between public and private associated with location-aware technologies. Google's mapping initiatives in particular have been at the center of these tensions. In this section, we consider some of the legal challenges posed to Google's mapping projects and how those challenges have shaped the broader cultural dialogue about location data.

Google Street View adds to the functionality of Google Maps a photographic addendum to its mapped streets. Photographs of both sides of the street, taken by roving cameras mounted on cars, are spliced together to create an impression of photographic continuity and made available on web and mobile interfaces. Not surprisingly, this effort raised some privacy concerns, as people complained about having an image of themselves or personal effects attached to what is essentially a public record. But when Google Street View first launched, the company had a strict policy in place for the removal or alteration of contested images. When San Francisco resident and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) privacy advocate Kevin Bankston asked that his picture be removed from a street corner, Google replied with a request for his name, location of image, and copy of his driver's license. But Bankston was incensed by this demand: “Apparently, you have to jump through more hoops than a trained seal,” he complained. “Perhaps they'd also like my mother's maiden name? Birth certificate? Urine sample?” (quoted in Poulsen, 2007). As a result of Bankston's protests, Google changed its policy, replacing the requirement of the driver's license with a signed statement of accuracy. The change in this policy resulted almost immediately in a windfall of new requests. Many people were unhappy with being part of a tacit public record that visually displayed their whereabouts. But most legal challenges have passed without incident for the company because privacy laws in the United States do not protect against being photographed in public space. Since all of Google's photographs were taken from public streets, the company is technically within its legal rights. However, Google's plans to expand to other countries have been interrupted by stricter privacy laws. Several European countries have denied Google access, while Canada and Australia have insisted on blurring out faces and license plates as a condition of entry.

As a means of assuaging growing privacy concerns, Google developed an application that would automatically blur faces and license plates beyond recognition. The response to this new feature was positive, but it did not succeed in staving off all lawsuits, as Google did not consider the privacy problems with photographing property. In April 2008, a Pittsburgh couple sued Google for invasion of privacy and trespassing, asserting that the Street View feature reduced the value of their home. Aaron and Christine Boring (Boring v. Google, Inc., 2009) claimed that the “major component of their purchase decision was a desire for privacy” and Google's photographs compromised the integrity of that privacy (quoted in Slater, 2008). They also claimed that because they live on a private road, simply driving down the street with car-mounted cameras was an act of trespassing. This case is interesting because it is the first instance of a privacy suit against Google that was focused on property. It questioned to what extent one's personal property should be protected from being added to Google's “official record” of the searchable world.²

In the United States, the town of North Oaks, Minnesota, has positioned itself at the forefront of this battle. The city has banned Google from taking Street View photographs, claiming, in a manner similar to the Borings, that because all of its town roads are private, Google has no authority to photograph them. This St. Paul suburb of about 4,500 people was the first city to take action against Google's efforts, arguing that photographs taken from private streets are an act of trespassing, while satellite photographs are not (Amouth, 2008). The city sent a letter to Google in January 2008 asking that all photographs be taken down and destroyed. Google complied. Legal questions aside, the case of North Oaks points to some limits in the social tolerance for being mapped. By creating a cartographic record of these photographs, Google has forced the connection between photographic surveillance and cartographic surveillance. Different than simply being photographed in a public space, when a photograph is located and given the functionality of a map, the private space or information of that photograph takes on a public function. So while some are opportunistic, these legal challenges are reflective of a perceived loss of agency and control over private spaces as photographs of these spaces acquire this new public functionality. At a macro level, it is not difficult to comprehend the benefits of making close-up images of the world searchable; but on a micro level, it is necessary to contend with the fact that the world is composed of people and their data. Making the world searchable is equated to locating and identifying users. Making every location findable presupposes that everyone wants to be found.

But Google's philosophy has always been that it is better to apologize than ask for permission.³ The privacy complaints about Street View were surely anticipated – minor details in the larger vision of making the world searchable. For Google, the attitude of not wanting to be found is a relic. It has been successful in selling that culture shift. These concerns are fringe; for many people, being found (both by oneself and by others) is tantamount to socialization. Getting on the map is a virtue, a marker of participation in a culture that, through no small effort from Google, values location.

The example of Google Maps points to a broader phenomenon. The possibility of having one's location information disclosed, whether a photograph or longitude and latitude coordinates, prompts serious concerns about the invasion of privacy and fears of surveillance, especially when the person being located has no control over who accesses that location information. The issue is not simply that the information is recorded, but also that the information is potentially used in a way that the subject of that information cannot control. The dividing line between private and public in the context of net locality is increasingly drawn by the level at which one feels that one has control over one's located information. This is most evident when we consider location-based services (LBS).

Making Location Data Public

LBS provide location-specific information for anyone with a GPS-equipped cell phone. This information can come in the form of advertisements, coupons, restaurant reviews, Wikipedia articles, or information about the location of nearby services, such as gas stations or coffee shops. While these services do not necessarily reveal their users' location to people nearby, users must allow the service provider to pinpoint their location to receive the desired information. And unbeknownst to many people using these services, this information is often shared with commercial partners, such as corporate sponsors and application developers. As a subset of LBS, location-based social networks (LBSNs) not only transmit the users' location information to the service provider, but also share this location with members of the users' social network. For example, a Foursquare or Facebook Places user might be able to share her location with known people in her “friends” list, or, if she is using a service like LooptMix, with anybody in the vicinity who is using LooptMix.

The disclosure of one's location, either to service providers or to peers, is often framed by the media as an invasion of privacy – in this case, locational privacy. In an analysis of popular press accounts of LBS, Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith (2010b) identified two main fears related to privacy: the fear of top-down surveillance (mostly from advertising companies and the government), and the fear of collateral surveillance, that is, disclosing one's location to other people.

Almost all LBS business models are based on location-based advertising. LBSNs, such as Facebook Places, Loopt, Foursquare, Whrrl, and Google Latitude, are all provided to users free of charge. The easiest way to monetize these services is through advertising. For example, when checking into a location with Foursquare, users can find coupons for nearby retail shops. Foursquare motivates participation through its internal structure of competition (badges and mayorships), as well as through its external reward structure (coupons and free stuff). Advertisements actually become a reward for the user. Location-based ads make the advertising more relevant to the user, almost like impulse purchasing in a supermarket checkout line. The assortment of candy bars and mints displayed in checkout lines is there to satisfy the immediate desires of shoppers in an impromptu fashion. Likewise, location-based advertising is based on a just-in-time model of consumer needs. One typically does not go to Foursquare to find coupons. But when coupons appear and are relevant both to past consumer behavior and to the location of the consumer, they motivate impulse purchases.⁴

However, consumers are often unaware of what LBS developers and mobile phone providers do with their location information. If location information is provided to advertisers, as the example above demonstrates, consumers most often have no choice but to receive ads if they want to use the service. They also generally cannot choose the type of ad they receive, and lack awareness about which companies receive updates of their location. At this point, LBS data-sharing practices and privacy policies are not clear to most consumers. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requires that services obtain consent from users before targeting them with mobile advertising, but that consent is often buried in the fine print of lengthy user agreements. Many users, however, are willing to consent to the terms of these privacy statements (usually without reading them) if they see value in the type of information they are receiving.

People obviously have differing levels of concern about the issue of personal privacy. As Raynes-Goldie (2010) has noted, “By 2003, the number of privacy pragmatists – that is, people who are concerned about their privacy but are willing to trade some of it for something beneficial – had risen” when compared both to privacy fundamentalists and to people unconcerned about privacy. This is in line with previous research, which states that users are willing to give out private information depending on their perception of the usefulness of the application offered to them (Ackerman, Cranor, & Reagle, 1999; Ackerman, Kempf, & Miki, 2003; Barkuus & Dey, 2003). So, as LBS become more popular (and consequently more useful), users will likely be more willing to disclose location information. Indeed, according to ABI Research (2009), “the number of subscribers to handset-based location based services doubled in 2008 to more than 18 million.” The same report attests that while navigation continues to lead in terms of total subscribers, LBSN has the highest year-to-year growth rates of all mobile services. This suggests that simply disclosing one's location is not a problem for the average user. Disclosing location information only becomes a problem when users are unaware of who owns the information about their location, and with whom their location is being shared.

In addition to concerns about unknowingly sharing location information with advertising companies, de Souza e Silva and Frith's (2010b) study found that the popular press generally focuses on the concern that the government might be using location data to monitor people. For example, an eWeek article by Roy Mark from March 2009 put it this way: “When it comes to government surveillance, the legal interface between law enforcement and your phone and Internet service providers is a shadowy place, and it's often unclear what kinds of data companies are willing to provide to the government” (Mark, 2009). The idea of companies sharing location information with the government is of grave concern to many people, and has been described by privacy advocates as “a catastrophic corruption of consent” (Warren, 2009).

In addition to the top-down surveillance we have been discussing, de Souza e Silva and Frith (2010b) also show that media accounts of LBS point to concerns about collateral surveillance, or “people tracking,” as some media outlets describe it. Collateral surveillance is the act of letting others – generally, those you know – know where you are. Location-based social networks and games are often the target of such concerns. These practices are associated with a loss of control over one's personal location information. For example, a Newsday article had this to say: “Thanks to the sweet/creepy new Google Latitude, [stalking is] easier than ever” (“Google online tool,” 2009). The “fear of being tracked,” as the awareness of location is generally described (e.g., Mason, 2009), is frequently connected to unknowingly giving up location information. For instance, as John Markoff in the New York Times warned: “You may use your phone to find friends and restaurants, but somebody else may be using your phone to find you and find out about you” (Markoff, 2009). Or as David Rowan (2009), from The Times, warns: “Let's just imagine that a jealous partner gains access to your unattended phone and enables Latitude without your knowledge.” In all these accounts, it is clear that news outlets frame issues of locational privacy in particular ways: They warn users about the dangers of collateral stalking and governmental surveillance, but they ignore the major implications of the public sharing of location data for the construction of social networks, our experience of public spaces, and our perception of privacy. The above-mentioned reported privacy breaches are not directly related to personal harm (Solove, 2008) but actually stem from losing control of one's personal information. It is not that people's location information is inherently private – in fact, LBS are premised on information accessibility; it is that users and entities can use someone's location information in unpredictable ways.

In response to the popular press concerns about privacy, some software designers have created safeguards for users to control their privacy settings, such as the ability to select which people are allowed in their network, or the ability to hide location from specific users (de Souza e Silva & Frith, 2010a). However, users' comfort in the security of their information, or their ability to prevent location information from being accessed by unknown users, is still quite volatile. This volatility is likely caused by the lack of clarity in the privacy settings within many of these applications. It is difficult to understand what the settings mean, or even if they can be adjusted. For example, Foursquare's default setting is to share location information with all members of a user's network. The user can manually turn that feature off every time she checks into a location, but there is no way to choose some members of a network over others. Additionally, when checking into a place with Foursquare, users can automatically see other Foursquare users in the vicinity, even if they were not added to their network.

Similar concerns have been reported by users of location-based mobile games (LBMGs). In their study of the game Mogi, Licoppe and Inada (2009) describe a case perceived as stalking by one female player who could see a nearby, unidentified player on her mobile screen. Despite repeated requests by the female player, the anonymous player never disclosed his identity, resulting in feelings of fear that the digital stalking would cross over into physical space. This example demonstrates that awareness of location might lead to power asymmetries. Similarly, Licoppe and Inada (2006) describe situations in which both players see each other on their mobile screen, but only one claims he or she can see the other in the physical space of the city, leading to uncomfortable and almost fearful feelings in the player under the risk of losing her anonymity. They also suggest that at the core of an LBMG experience – what they call a culture of proximity – is the assumption that one's location is public, so such behaviors (which treat location as private) actually run counter to user expectations of location-aware technology.

However, the very assumptions and fears of Mogi players are rooted in not recognizing a more profound shift in the nature of how individuals perceive and acknowledge each other in city spaces. Location-aware technologies have the potential to make people's location publicly available, which contradicts traditional expectations of anonymity in city spaces (Lehtonen & Mänpää, 1997; Simmel, 1971). Whether people decide to share their location only with five friends in their social network, broadcast it openly online on Twitter, or share it with their cell phone provider, these different degrees of publicity problematize what it is to be anonymous in public spaces. For example, before location-aware applications, when riding in a bus, a passenger could look around and see other co-present people, but he would know very little about them. However, if a Foursquare player gets on a bus, he will be able not only to visualize on his mobile phone screen other passengers who are Foursquare players, but also possibly to access personal information about them, such as their name and location history. Licoppe and Inada (2009) suggest that the wide use of location-based applications will force us to question how we manage social interactions in public spaces, leading to “the development of an interaction order founded on the public character of locations” (p. 123).

The increased popularity of LBS, and the corresponding social transactions premised on personal location information, is foundational to what we call net locality and is altering traditional notions of privacy. Comfort with locational privacy, in particular, is determined by the extent to which private information is made public on the terms established by the creator of that information. While distinctions are made between top-down and collateral surveillance, the expressed anxieties are the same: in a situation characterized by the public disclosure of information, the extent to which users control the conditions of this disclosure sets the terms of communication and the boundaries of private space. In the following section, we situate this shift in the public discourse about privacy within a longer history of the concept and expand on the power dynamics implicit in net locality.

Rethinking Privacy and Surveillance

Understanding how conceptions of privacy have changed over time might help explain how and why location-aware technologies challenge the meaning and experience of privacy and how users of these technologies perceive public and private spaces. In his book Understanding Privacy, Daniel Solove (2008) describes the various conceptions of privacy throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Solove criticizes these conceptions as being either too narrow or too broad, and proposes that we should instead understand privacy according to specific contextual situations. Conceptions of privacy have changed over the years; and at any given time, there is considerable disagreement about their meaning (Sheller & Urry, 2003). In US society, privacy was originally imagined as “the right to be let alone,” following Warren and Brandeis's famous article “The Right to Privacy” (Warren & Brandeis, 1890). However, the idea of privacy has also been frequently addressed in relation to forms of power: as power to limit access to the self, power to conceal information about oneself, and power to have control over one's personal information. As we have illustrated, the majority of privacy issues that arise within net localities are related to the fear of losing control and power over one's (locational) information, and how to manage the public sharing of location.

Solove suggests that while the Big Brother metaphor was useful for addressing a number of privacy problems, it has severe limitations when it comes to the database problem. “The most significant shortcoming of the Big Brother metaphor is that it fails to focus on the appropriate form of power” (Solove, 2004, p. 34). Within the database logic explored by Solove, personal information is collected by machines, instead of by one individual who can watch another's every movement. The personal information collected is generally not something that one would consider “private” (for example, name, race, marital status) and is therefore not seen as threatening. The main problem emerges, however, when this information is aggregated and used to construct what he calls “digital dossiers,” which are used by corporations to predict behavioral and consumption patterns. Users generally have no control over what is done with their personal information once it is collected.

When it comes to location information, the situation is similar. LBS privacy statements are generally vague enough that they do not inform users about what kind of information is collected, who the partners are, and what they might do with the information. So the problem is less of a Big Brother-style, top-down surveillance and more of a lack of control about the destiny of collected information. According to Solove (2004), a more adequate metaphor to address information collection in the digital age is Franz Kafka's The Trial. Rather than focusing on centralized surveillance, as is the case of Big Brother, The Trial is about a bureaucratic system, which never informs the victim about the purpose of his trial, or the reason for information collection. The anxiety is about lack of control, and not about surveillance. In Solove's (2004) words, “the problem with databases and the practices associated with them is that they disempower people” (p. 41).⁵

Moving away from traditional ideas of top-down surveillance allows us to reconsider privacy in net localities. It is how we use information that matters, not just our ability to keep it secret. Simply disclosing one's location is not a problem per se, but it becomes one when users have no control of who accesses it and what is done with it. Often, when location information is aggregated through applications such as CitySense, it is used to predict people's behavior in the city. While this practice is not overtly harmful to the individual, it can be used to deliver location-specific advertisements or to create profiles of particular areas of the city (Gandy, 1993; Lyon, 2003).

Indeed, what we are witnessing with the development of net locality is a shift in the traditional model of top-down surveillance toward a more pervasive model of all encompassing surveillance in which all individuals in the network know the position of all others. The actual function of this surveillance is unclear for most end users, and the threat unspecified, which, according to the popular press, is exactly what makes people fear the disclosure of their location (de Souza e Silva & Frith, 2010b). Since the popularization of camera phones and portable camcorders, it is clear that we have moved away from the Orwellian model of top-down surveillance.

Steve Mann and colleagues (2003) proposed the concept of sousveillance to describe ways by which individuals might be empowered through the use of portable communication technologies such as cell phones and camcorders. Mann's idea of sousveillance emphasizes a bottom-up approach by which users are able to neutralize surveillance by inverting its mechanism (i.e., allowing individuals to observe and control corporations and the government). However, as Matt Adams points out, “we are still locked in an Orwellian paradigm that has long since passed its sell by date” (quoted in de Souza e Silva & Sutko, 2009, p. 81). And he adds that sousveillance is nothing new, given that it has been with us since the rise of the camcorder. Although it is possible to claim that individuals own an increasing number of sousveillance tools, what these tools generally contribute to is not a neutralization of surveillance but a creation of other forms of collateral, pervasive, and open surveillance by which everybody is able to keep track of everybody else.

Location-aware applications typically prompt anxiety because of the perceived absoluteness in which they locate the user. Someone or something knows exactly where you are at any given time. But locating somebody or disclosing information about someone is not necessarily an invasion of privacy. As Solove (2008) suggests, privacy issues need to be understood contextually. It is when information is taken out of context and used without notification or consent that users perceive a breach in privacy. For example, a Facebook Places user might choose to share her location with some of her Facebook friends without being aware that Facebook is using that information to deliver location-based advertisements. The use of her information is not consistent with her intentions regarding the service.

It is likely that these privacy concerns will continue to grow. But more likely the terms of the privacy debate will so radically depart from the present framework that what will constitute a breach and what will satisfy demand is now impossible to predict. With the increasing use of location-aware technologies that allow for different types of surveillance and data collection, it is natural that preexisting notions of privacy might be challenged and eventually changed. It is very unlikely, however, that privacy is dead, as some media accounts suggest. Privacy still matters; only, the terms of the debate are changing. It is no longer simply a matter of protecting the private from the public, as it is often a user's intention to make private information public. It is now a matter of being able to define and control the shifting boundaries between private and public. In the following section, we address this shift by examining how users bolster their sense of privacy through the “personalization” of public spaces.

Blurring the Line Between Private and Public Spaces

Technology constitutes society and is shaped and influenced by it (Castells, 2000). For example, with the introduction of new transportation and communication technologies there is often a challenge to established definitions of public and private. Gant and Kiesler (2002) note that with the popularization of rail transport in the mid-nineteenth century, the separation between work (public) and personal life (private) grew more definitive as people started commuting. While transportation technologies contributed to the creation of more distinct boundaries between the public and the private, communication technologies such as the telephone, the telegraph, and the television brought the public within the private space of home (Moores, 2004; Spigel, 1992). And this is even more pronounced with mobile technologies (Bull, 2001, 2006; Gergen, 2002; Manguel, 1997; Sterne, 2003). Critics have accused the Walkman and the iPod of creating pockets of private spaces inside public spaces. Mobile listening devices raised concerns about the integrity of public space, as Hosokawa (1984, 1987) and Chalmers (1994) show. More generally speaking, mobile devices challenge where the private ends and the public begins (Fortunati, 2002; Gant & Kiesler, 2002; Katz & Aahkus, 2002; Ling, 2004; Puro, 2002).

Traditionally, the private space of the home has been envisioned as a controlled personal space in clear distinction from “uncontrolled” public spaces. But net localities challenge this. Users can wield more control over these public spaces by uploading and accessing place-specific information. As Eric Gordon (2009) has noted elsewhere, in a net locality, “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” (p. 26). So, beyond the traditional challenge of the public encroaching upon the private (transforming personal location information into public data), net localities exacerbate the problem of the private encroaching upon the public (users' abilities to “personalize” public spaces by aggregating location data in accordance with their immediate and specific needs).

Of course, this ability is largely a matter of technical functionality, such as properly adjusting privacy settings. When users are not confident in their control over their privacy settings, they fear the loss of privacy. However, when users feel in control of their personal information and their ability to use it, they celebrate the possibility of connecting with other users and accessing location-based information (boyd, 2008; Solove, 2004). Giving up location information might be acceptable, as long as users feel they are in control of it and aware of what it entails. For example, Google Latitude's privacy settings allow users to lie about their location by inserting it manually. Having their position visualized on a map at a fake location theoretically gives users the ultimate control over their location information. So, users might be more inclined to use a service like Google Latitude if they are made to feel in control over the nature of the location information they publicly disclose. In this case, the act of “privatizing” public spaces through LBS is really a matter of wielding information to feel in control within those spaces.

But how is this done? While some feelings of control might be cultivated by walking down the street with earbuds in and listening to a favorite album, it is important to distinguish between consuming media on a mobile device while in public and engaging with location information for the purpose of interacting with a space. 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 iPod's songs are typically loaded independent of location. But location-aware technologies draw information from the physical surroundings. For example, a user equipped with a GPS-enabled cell phone in Times Square who opens the application WikiMe is able to read Wikipedia articles about Times Square. Similarly, if she decides to write a tweet about Times Square, that piece of information will be coded with the longitude and latitude (longlat) coordinates of that place. And location-based advertisements are delivered to users based on their location in physical space. For instance, a Foursquare player who checks in to the neighborhood's Mexican restaurant might receive a coupon if the restaurant is registered with Foursquare. Besides accessing place-specific information in the form of articles, nearby restaurant reviews, coupons, and the location of surrounding gas stations and cafeterias, location-based social networks help users find other people who happen to be nearby.

Privacy Through Exclusion

One of the unfortunate and obvious side effects of the use of LBS is the potential for a different type of social divide between those who have access to the technology and those who do not. It is no longer simply location that is a determinant or marker of class, but also location awareness. The use of location-aware technologies can exclude those who do not use them. For example, if an individual is riding in a bus and opens Foursquare, she will be able to play and interact with other passengers who have Foursquare on their phones. She might also come to personally know these people, since they have some things in common (they similarly like games, own smart phones, and are riding the same bus). But the mobile interface might make her simultaneously pay attention to other nearby Foursquare players and ignore those passengers who are not using the application. This is distinct from the early days of mobile phones, when the devices were blamed for disconnecting people from their surroundings. Location-aware technologies generally do the exact opposite – they draw people's attention to their surrounding space. The difference here is that they introduce new forms of social differentiation into that space. Although these technologies increase the potential for communication and coordination with people who possess them, they might reduce communication with those who do not.

Spaces can become “overfiltered.” Users can opt to encounter the same people and things, just as they tend to do on the web (Sunstein, 2006). In her empirical study of the mobile social network Dodgeball, Lee Humphreys (2007) observed that its users did not necessarily meet more people but instead hung out at different places with the same people. Humphreys also found that people used Dodgeball to meet existing friends out on the town and, in meeting those friends, did not necessarily connect to the general public, “thus leading to a kind of social molecularization” (p. 356). She affirmed that even when users did “meet new people through Dodgeball, these people were fairly demographically similar” (p. 356). In other words, the diversity of urban spaces may become masked in net localities. Rather than chance encounters of difference, she suggests that mobile social networks facilitate chance encounters of sameness.

But this analysis discounts the nuance of net localities and the importance of urban spaces for constructing social meaning. Even if a user of an LBSN is able to select and exclude individuals from engaging in her immediate social surroundings, the resulting social processes do not necessarily lead to sameness. In fact, discovery is often facilitated by similarity (consider the experience of browsing books in a library). Also, the experience of space facilitated by LBSN is not solely premised on social encounters; information about spaces accessible through various applications can alter one's experience of those spaces significantly.

In any case, the urge to be among familiar things, people, and spaces is not solely a consequence of the use of new digital technologies, nor is it new. In the nineteenth century, sociologist Georg Simmel (1971) described the blasé attitude as a cultivated appearance of indifference used to protect the city dweller from the constant flood of stimulation. Simmel, while lamenting much about the “modern metropolis,” understood that filtering was necessary to access renewed social opportunities and the corresponding enhancement of one's mental life. People in cities have always had the capacity to filter out what they did not want to see, from adopting an attitude to wearing earphones to consulting mobile devices. In the case of net localities, it is difficult to conclude that simply because there are filters, users will use them only to exclude. In fact, instead of redirecting users' attention to like-minded and physically absent networks, as is often the case with mobile phone conversations, location-aware technologies (re)direct the user to his or her immediate surroundings, which typically encompasses some difference.

But difference in everyday interactions with space is rarely something that people seek out. The feeling of being in control in public is often facilitated by an acknowledgment of the familiar. If a user knows there are people like her in a certain place, she is likely more comfortable going there. So, a place that is unfamiliar might gain familiarity if people using location-aware applications can “see” their social network before going there (Sutko & de Souza e Silva, 2011). Take CitySense as an example. The mobile application displays heatmaps that illustrate spatial concentrations of people in a given space. If a user notices that a number of people are congregating at a little known public beach that she is particularly fond of, she might be compelled to go there. The people one encounters in familiar places are themselves somewhat familiar because of their presence and affinity for the shared place. The difference, however, is that in the case of CitySense, the assessment of a place is done remotely via a mobile phone screen.

So, strategic filtering and the ability to assess a place before going there facilitate feelings of control amongst users of LBSNs. And there is some evidence that these communicative processes replace other forms of correspondence. For example, Nicolas Nova and Fabien Girardin (2009) tested their location-based mobile game CatchBob! (Nova & Girardin, 2007) in two modes: with and without mutual location awareness. One of their findings was that the presence of location awareness, that is, automatic detection of players' locations, led to a decrease in communication within the group. While this finding seems obvious (if you have information about each other's location, you do not need to call and ask for it), it points to changes in how people communicate in net localities. Some verbal communication is replaced by digital inference. This points to the fact that personal feelings of control are central to communication in public spaces. How people negotiate these issues is transformative of the communication context in which people interact. As we have seen, the introduction of location-aware technologies might reduce one form of correspondence, just as it increases another. Location-aware technologies facilitate a diversity of experiences for those who possess them by allowing users to infer qualities about strangers based on where they are and, likewise, infer qualities about unfamiliar locations based on people they know.

Regardless of what sort of experiences location-aware technologies facilitate, people who do not have access to them no doubt experience spaces differently. David Wood and Stephen Graham (2005) call this “differential mobility.” They distinguish between two types of mobility: high mobility, pertaining to those few with easy access, and slow mobility, which includes the majority, who have difficult, blocked access. In this sense, mobility is directly related to power. At their core, location-aware technologies are contribute to this differential mobility. For example, the version of Loopt on Google's Android phones provides place-specific traffic updates (Loopt, 2008), and those with access to the application might be able to reach their destination faster than those without access. However, as Wood and Graham note, differential mobility has always existed. From the moment some people rode or were carried while others walked, differences in mobility have existed, reflecting and reinforcing social hierarchies (p. 177).

The result is that people have markedly different experiences of the spaces they occupy and markedly different expectations of spaces depending on where they are. For example, two individuals walk side by side down a crowded street – one perceives the street as only a physical space and the other perceives it as a net locality. The physical space is unchanged for the individual excluded from the LBSN while the LBSN user perceives the physical space embedded with digital information. Previously, individuals could listen to music, read, or daydream. But the space they occupied was still the same space occupied by other people sharing that physical location. Location-aware technologies change this. Users can “customize” their experience of public spaces with features like LooptMix that allow a user to choose what type of person shows up on her map. This customization of space alters the nature of that space. LBSN and LBS in general create a type of “differential public space,” in which physically co-located people experience the same place very differently.

Conclusion

According to Manuel Castells (2009), “The sources of social power in our world have not changed fundamentally from our historical experience” (p. 50). What has changed, however, is that power is increasingly defined in the context of networks. With whom we interact and at what location are no longer just circumstances of society but the defining context of society. Net locality further establishes the importance of networks in everyday life. While it provides an unprecedented control to some, through exclusion, it threatens to further exacerbate existing inequities. Location-aware technologies are normalizing information-rich spaces within everyday interactions; as such, they challenge widely held conceptions of private and public and introduce new methods of establishing personal control over these emerging information landscapes. As we have described, the distinction between public and private has shifted with each new communication and transportation technology; net locality marks yet another significant shift.

Governments can use location awareness to track how fast people are driving; some products are being marketed for individuals to track their spouses or their children; advertisers can easily use location information to target people with relevant ads. As Castells points out, networks define the context for power in society. And when people's physical locations are located and mapped within that network, the ability of networks to define the context of power is enhanced. In this chapter, we have demonstrated how issues of power are manifesting in public spaces, and specifically urban spaces, as people explore new practices with location-aware technologies and struggle with the pervasiveness of location information. As mapped and portable information becomes a more powerful mechanism for establishing boundaries between inside and outside, familiar and unfamiliar, social interactions are adjusting to these new dynamics. These shifting dynamics are foundational to what we call net locality and will continue to provide the context for urban social interactions in the early part of the twenty-first century. More and more spaces are information rich; physical landscapes are peppered with information about those landscapes and the people who occupy them. Whether one has access to that information and how one wields that information for personal control are the primary questions associated with net locality, and should be, as more and more media are consumed on mobile and portable devices, a central question for the future of media studies more generally.

NOTES

This chapter draws from one of the chapters in our book: Gordon and de Souza e Silva (2011).

1 While it is true that people in the developed world (a.k.a. Global North) have historically had more widespread access to the Internet and to telecommunication infrastructures, it is also important to highlight that increasingly countries in the Global South have access to information networks mostly through mobile communication technologies. The International Telecommunications Union 2010 statistics show that “access to mobile networks is now available to 90% of the world population and 80% of the population living in rural areas” (ITU, 2010). However, we shouldn't forget there is still a technological divide that increasingly consists of connection speed and type of technology (rather than access vs. no access), and that access to technology does not necessarily lead to social and economic inequalities.

2 Although there is a distinction between “privacy” and the idea of private property, we should keep in mind that privacy laws in the United States emerged as a response to possible threats to private property and to the self. As legal scholar Daniel Solove (2008) explains, privacy has been traditionally conceptualized within a rhetoric of harm: harm to oneself or to one's personal property. In order for lawmakers and judges to create policies to protect privacy, they had to articulate why invading somebody's privacy was problematic, and the most obvious way of doing that was by showing how privacy invasion might be harmful. So, although, following Solove, privacy is a multifaceted concept, its meaning has always been intrinsically connected to private property in US society. In fact, Solove (2008) points out that there are strict laws in US society that protect against surveillance in private places (p. 110).

3 This was certainly true with the Google Books initiative, its effort to copy the entire contents of five major research libraries, including Harvard, New York Public, and University of Michigan. While this effort has resulted in lawsuits from book publishers, before the complaints even surfaced the project was well on its way to completion.

4 This is similar to Google's advertising strategy on the web that directs ads to users based on search histories, email content, and consumer behavior, and makes relevant commodities only clicks away from a given web “site.”

5 Manuel Castells (2009) also refutes the idea of a centralized power in the network society. He argues, “It is precisely because there is no unified power elite capable of keeping the programming and switching operations of all important networks under its control that more subtle, complex, and negotiated systems of power enforcement must be established” (p. 47).

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