Social web services belong to the most remarkable evolutions in recent years. At the professional level, we are witnessing the increasing success of LinkedIn, Xing, Ecademy and many more. At the more general social level, we hardly know any young people who are not member of Facebook, Netlog, Twitter or anything similar. People share their experiences and their emotions by means of texts, pictures and movies with almost anyone who may be interested.Adding the element of 'geographical location' to a social web service creates a feeling of omnipresence with your family and friends. You can follow somebody's whereabouts on the screen of your laptop or mobile phone and meet him/her on his/her way. We call this a location based social web service. BLIIN Live! is an example of such a service.
It is obvious that these services involve some risks related to privacy. Location information can be abused. Therefore it is imperative that 'vulnerable people', especially young people, start using secure tools in a secure way. Moreover, in a family context, parents often need to know their children's position to be able to protect them properly. But children also have a certain privacy right. It is important to find a right balance.
This is in a nutshell one of the main goals of the Liveline project that is starting now within the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for Galileo Applications. This project will be presented and demonstrated at the Galileo Application Days in Brussels next week. More information is available on the web site.
http://www.liveline-project.eu/
http://www.gsa.europa.eu/go/news/do-you-know-where-your-children-are
