Location based services -: new challenges for planning and public administration?

The massive spread of mobile phones and their social acceptance is an important information-technological feature of the beginning of the 21st century. In addition to making calls, mobile phones are associated with various additional services and games, which are becoming part of everyday life. As the location of mobile phones can be precisely tracked in space, they can be used for investigating the space-time behaviour of society. In this paper we will introduce the Social Positioning Method and its possible applications in the organisation and planning of public life. The Social Positioning Method (SPM) studies social flows in time and space by analysing the location coordinates of mobile phones and the social identification of the people carrying them. So far, relatively few SPM surveys have been carried out-the reason for that is related to people's anxieties about the idea of being tracked, as well as technical aspects. In this article we assert that SPM will become very wide-spread in the future and will fundamentally change public life and administration. Due to the widespread use of telephones and the possibilities of social positioning, the questions of privacy and freedom of the individual are already being discussed. Despite this, there has still been only a limited discussion concerning live-map geography and real-time planning in relation to privacy issues. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.