Foot-driven computing: our first glimpse of location privacy issues (Invited paper)
Frank Stajano · 2009
Ubiquitous computing has been a fashionable research theme for the past twenty years, so much so that many research groups have felt the urge to give it a different name (pervasive computing, calm computing, ambient intelligence etc etc) in order to claim that they were doing something new or at least slightly different from everyone else. One of these many alternate names has been “context-aware computing”, to suggest systems and devices that would sense the “context ” of a situation and behave accordingly: for example, a mobile phone might sense that its owner is “in a meeting ” and automatically switch from ringtone to vibration mode. I have been professionally involved in ubiquitous computing research since 1992 [14, Chapter 2], when I joined the ORL (Olivetti Research Ltd) laboratory in Cambridge, UK, and I have long been somewhat sceptical of the vague semantics generally attributed to the term “context ” in the above usage. When we cut out the fog of more or less useful abstractions introduced by the middleware layer, we find that in a majority of practical cases “context ” essentially boils down to location; therefore, “Location-driven computing ” or “Location-based services ” are names I find more descriptive and concrete. At ORL we also jokingly used to say “foot-driven computing”, not referring to any hypothetical pedals but to the practice of influencing the behaviour of computer