Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
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Saturday, March 31, 2007
Japanese survey on the use of GPS
As always you can interpret statistics any way you like, which the author to 'Nearly half consider mobile GPS a privacy threat' has done in the title.
More interesting from an adoption point-of-view is that as many as 30% of the asked DoCoMo subscribers had actually used GPS, and 34% want to.
Also very interesting is the fact that all new phones in Japan need to support GPS from April 2007 (which should be tomorrow, if I'm not mistaken).
Based on this information (assuming it's correct) it means Japan is way ahead of USA. Sometimes laws can start a revolution, as mobile service providers will of course love this.
There are certainly concerns about privacy, and they should be taken seriously. I'm not sure I would want anyone I hadn't opted in (or been forced to in the case of emergency services) to at all have access to my position info.
The users involved in the survey volunteered, and hence might not be representative for DoCoMo's customer base as a whole.
More interesting from an adoption point-of-view is that as many as 30% of the asked DoCoMo subscribers had actually used GPS, and 34% want to.
Also very interesting is the fact that all new phones in Japan need to support GPS from April 2007 (which should be tomorrow, if I'm not mistaken).
Based on this information (assuming it's correct) it means Japan is way ahead of USA. Sometimes laws can start a revolution, as mobile service providers will of course love this.
There are certainly concerns about privacy, and they should be taken seriously. I'm not sure I would want anyone I hadn't opted in (or been forced to in the case of emergency services) to at all have access to my position info.
The users involved in the survey volunteered, and hence might not be representative for DoCoMo's customer base as a whole.
