Good post Erik. I agree with your conclusion - security and policy control will be critical when surfacing these services. Convergence and the easy accessibility of telephony capabilities will raise a lot of interesting issues.
For example, I recently downloaded BT's Web21C toolkit. I am interested in using it to build a telephony mashup of my own. But I was quite alarmed with the following description of its capabilities, found in the README in the toolkit documentation regarding their Location service:
So what are these capabilities?
* The Location service allows the application developer to determine the geographic location (latitude, longitude) of any
cellular device any where in the world.
* The Contacts service provides the ...
At first, I was thrilled. It sounds like the Location service is offered without limitation (that word any is very permissive). And because Google Maps is the mashup ingredient of choice, I was thinking I could build a real-time map mashup pinpointing everyone I know on a Google Map. I was thinking how cool that would be, until I thought about the privacy issue with that. Would BT really allow me to become a virtual stalker? The Google Street Map privacy discussion would be trivial in comparison to BT allowing this.
Fortunately, the truth is the documentation is perhaps a bit too terse. BT does not allow you to just randomly query for the location of the device for any phone number. It will first send a text message to the device requesting permission to disclose its location. So BT has done the right thing.
But it shows the importance of being judicious about the use of these telephony services.
Posted by: plaird on June 18, 2007 at 2:51 PM
