http://foursquare.com/
"Foursquare on your phone gives you & your friends new ways of exploring
your city. Earn points & unlock badges for discovering new thing"
Nice combination of social networking, twitter, LBS. No mention of privacy issues.

GeoLife GPS Trajectories
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/b16d359d-d164-469e-9fd4-da...

From www.npr.org:

"By analyzing cell phone movements and online search queries, scientists can monitor traffic in real time and track disease outbreaks more efficiently, but at what cost to privacy? Computer scientists Tom Mitchell and Deborah Estrin discuss the pros and cons of crowd sourcing personal data."
Listen to the full story at
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121615586

"EPIC Urges Congress to Adopt Privacy Safeguards for Locational Data"
EPIC is very active in the US to pursue location privacy issues in US. Check out their statement
at http://epic.org/events/Locational_Data_Stmt.pdf

I was watching Future Fast Forward at CNN the first day of 2010 after a long night. One of the questions raised by Campbell Brown, (CNN Anchor) was “What will the world be like in the next 10, 20, 30 years?”. Towards the end of the program the futurist Watts Wacker made really interesting comments about privacy. Here is the transcript I found from :
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1001/01/ec.01.html

A paper from GeoPKDD reasearch results with title
"Clustering Trajectories of Moving Objects in an Uncertain World"
(by Nikos Pelekis, Ioannis Kopanakis, Evangelos Kotsifakos, Elias Frentzos, and
Yannis Theodoridis) was just announced that it receives the best application
paper award in IEEE ICDM'09 to be held in Miami in December 2009.

Big congratulations to our Greek friends!!

Paper by MODAP members with title Preventing Velocity-based Linkage Attacks in Location-Aware Applications (by Gabriel Ghinita, Maria Luisa Damiani, Claudio Silvestri, and Elisa Bertino) got the runner up for the best paper award at ACM GIS 2009.

There is increasing interest in privacy issues in location based services and GIS applications. During ACM Springl workshop in conjunction with ACM GIS conference there were really interesting talks on privacy covering a range of topics including streaming data, and 3D city modelling. The paper about the privacy issues in 3D city modelling was really interesting, in the sense that pictures taken to create the models may include private information which links people with places. The workshop draws growing interest in terms of audience and paper coverage.