Advanced telematics services in an age of portable data

By Ben Bloom

Open is the new closed. Oversharing. TMI. We’ve learned the effects of simple and instantaneous text, image and video publishing. Automotive telematics are poised to create a similar trend for location, yet with these new telematics services comes both a wonderful opportunity and a dangerous scenario for privacy and customer choice.

Open source advocates have suggested that data created by consumer web services ought to be “portable,” in that it is owned by the user and not the service provider, and ought to be transferable to any place of the user’s choosing. The Open Social movement demonstrated the public motivation behind this effort with social networking sites, which increasingly rely on a community of active volunteers and entrepreneurs to extend the product using open standards.

The OpenSocial initiative, a framework endorsed by Google, MySpace, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Bebo, hi5 and dozens of other sites, allows people and relationship information, user activity information, and persistence (the state of an interaction with an application) to be exchanged between/among users of different services. This framework allows user data to be “portable” — to move among sites and social networks, making user interactions and application innovation significantly easier. As automotive telematics and location-based services rise in popularity and users seek to integrate them into their social networking and community services, a similar approach will be needed for location data.

OpenSocial promises relief from repetitive tasks like creating accounts for new services, but as this DataPortability video suggests, the movement is broadly about “a free-flowing web totally within your control and privacy. A free, open, remixable web where your identity, contacts, relationships and media are free to follow you wherever you go.” Ironically, location data actually follows us, but may be locked up by inconsistent data structures and a myriad of closed approaches.

In the best case of automotive telematics, however, this metadata-rich content holds fantastic promise for the growth of new and useful services. Whether explicitly by us or by our interaction with the online world, our lives are now documented online. We begin to realize that there is something deeply necessary about the preservation of this documentary record that we create.

Location-based services
Automotive telematics applications face the challenge of interacting with other location-based services. Many are in their infancy, but on the horizon:

• Documents, timecards and security passwords can be authenticated with locations
• Online dating services, such as MeetMoi, or other social searches can be restricted to people around you right now
  
• Your phone will never ring in the movie theater after your movie has started
  
• Your car will turn the music up a bit when you enter a tunnel, or prompt you to pick up groceries when you’re near the store
  
• Speed trap locations can be logged precisely and shared with the community on Trapster
  

The concept of scrobbling — recording individually minute activities and publishing them — has caught on with music services, such as last.fm, and seems ripe for location information, as Brightkite has shown (for the early-adopter crowd). It is this kind of publishing and community-building that requires an open approach to user data. There is good reason to pair this open data with strong technological privacy solutions, as “commercial interests are adept at concealing questionable practices with fine print in a service contract or click-wrap agreement,” according to the three authors of this IEEE Computer article.

The automobile is a uniquely individual American good, and the symbolism associated with the car casts an extreme expectation of privacy into the experience of using these services. Privacy advocates have decried the unintended side-effects of the various PAYD (Pay as You Drive) auto insurance programs like Progressive’s MyRate, which monitors your vehicle’s onboard computer and offers discounts based on its data. Even if you save money, these privacy advocates say, the danger remains that your habits could be used against you or “hacked.”

Fundamentally, though, the data belongs to Progressive, not to the driver. The question is not merely about privacy; user rights to data ownership and portability are increasingly important to the innovative applications we have come to expect, and must be part of the technology. While saving money on car insurance is always attractive, it does not seem to be attractive enough to compromise our privacy.

The IETF GeoPriv task force is currently working on a specification for ensuring the maximum level of privacy, and significant user or user-agent choice, but it has not yet addressed the issue of stored location data and making it available after the fact. Even with this important work on the instantaneous privacy of “presence,” in-vehicle telematics and PND services, whether integrated with a vehicle ownership site or not, must apply principles similar to the Open Social movement. (See the related article Four ‘Open Social’ principles for vehicle telematics providers.)

What does this mean for automakers who offer vehicles with telematic services?
Today, such development efforts are not a requirement. In the near future, it will become a point of differentiation, with the advantage going to those firms with high levels of openness. Those firms will experience the loyalty and energy of a community-driven product. From the Where Location-Based Services platform, to the Dash Express Personal navigation device and finally QNX, the OS provider for the majority embedded automotive infotainment and telematics systems, including OnStar, deciding to open its platform to third-party developers, there is momentum supporting open platforms that will ultimately foster innovation, lower costs and grow markets.

As we move from economics to wikinomics, from consumption to co-creation, we buy fewer products and more services. We form deep digital relationships with the products we can extend and evolve and those will be the ones to survive.

Related links

• OpenSocial
• DataPortability — connect, control, share, remix; video created by Smashcut Media, January 2008
• Location-based services; PDF from The Focus on Locus: Symposium on Location-Based Services presentation given by Henning Schulzrinne, Columbia University Professor of Computer Science and Department Chair, at Columbia Business School, 07.11.2008
• MeetMoi
• Building the next generation of mobile applications: context awareness; MotoDev // The Cutting Edge, 07.01.2008
• Proxido
  
• Trapster
• Last.fm
  
• Brightkite
  
• Big Brother can save you money; CNNMoney.com, 07.17.2007
  
• MyRate Program, Progressive Insurance
• Wireless location privacy protection; IEEE Computer, 12.2003
  
• A privacy-preserving pay as you drive insurance scheme; PDF from IGNSS Symposium 2006 presentation given by Muhammed Usman Iqbal, School of Surveying and Spatial Information Systems, The University of New South Wales
  
• IETF Geographic Location/Privacy (geopriv) Charter
• Where
  
• Dash: Open Source
  
• Open development platforms for navigation systems; ABI Research, 05.23.2008 [sub]
  

Image credit
MyDash image appears courtesy of Dash Navigation, Inc.

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