Ian On The Red Dot

The new ads from Microsoft:

They are good. Take that you Apple snobs.

A few weeks ago, when I was in town, I received 3 smses on my phone. They were promotions sent by M1. They were unsolicited. I had been included into a trial of the new location based ad system without being asked for my permission or notified. If you had read the business section of yesterday’s and today’s newspaper, you would have been able to see the announcements by Singtel and M1 on their location based ad system.

Basically, using your phone, these two telcos can track your location and serve you ads for shops at that location. For example, I was at Paragon and received a promotion for Coffee Bean.

There are 3 things that concerns me about this ad system.

1. As A Consumer.

Firstly, they didn’t ask my permission to be included in this trial. Secondly, they didn’t notify me. Thirdly, it takes 10 days before my opt out is in effect. 10 days! Does it really take so long to administer a change after I opt out or do they want to be able to keep sending me smses for at least 10 more days.

I wonder whether their ‘Terms Of Service’ has anything to say about this. I guess they might have covered themselves over there.

2. As An Individual.

They started tracking my movement and location without my permission. Who knows when they started tracking. Who knows what they are tracking. This raises issues about privacy or in this case the lack of privacy.

Is anyone else concerned about this? Or maybe this is all in the TOS which no one really reads. Is it possible to tell telcos that I do not want to be tracked at all under any circumstances.

3. As Someone Interested in Information Technology.

Phones now have the ability to determine location. There is no need to get an additional gadget to use GPS. Some phone manufacturers expose that ability to developers through an API. However even with some phone manufacturers providing the API, promoting adoption of location based services where the user had to install a software on the mobile phone was not easy. It seems that people are less inclined to install software on their phone.

So developers became creative. Services like Dodgeball got users to sms in their location. There was no need to get users to install software. The heavy lifting was done at server side.

M1 and Singtel has shown that there is another way to do it. This way works because of their status as the service provider for mobile communications. While it is encouraging that the telcos are trying out new technology and services, the question that I have is that doesn’t them doing this possibly kill all form of competition and might eventually stifle innovation in this space.

Sure there is going to be competition between the telcos but is it now possible for other developers to compete with the telcos?

Of course, the telcos could create an API to their infrastructure which is tracking the mobile users and allow other developers to use it. For example, once a user has signed up for a service developed by another company, Singtel could request authentication from the user by sending a sms. The user replies with a confirmation and now the tracking information is passed on to the service. The telcos effectively becomes a broker for our location information and not just an ad provider.

I already have an idea for what such a system might look like and how it can be implemented.

The question then is would the telcos be like Facebook desiring everyone to build applications within their walled garden or would they be something like Twitter where everyone can use their API in the bigger environment.

Of course, even the jury is out on which scenario will be best for innovation if there is a difference at all.