The ability to blur and lie about our location does deserve consideration and should not be treated as entirely malevolent. It will be up to designers to allow the user to have full responsibility and freedom over the access control of their location information, rather than force adherence to uncomfortable regimes of dictated access control

Glassey, Richard

English

Glassey, R.

Name not available

Location spoofing

University of Strathclyde Institutional Repository

Strathprints Institutional RepositoryGlassey, R. (2004) Location spoofing. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Location-awareComputing, UbiComp 2004, 2004-09-07 - 2004-09-10, Nottingham, England.Strathprints is designed to allow users to access the research output of the University of Strathclyde.Copyright c© and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authorsand/or other copyright owners. You may not engage in further distribution of the material for anyprofitmaking activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute both the url (http://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/) and the content of this paper for research or study, educational, ornot-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge.Any correspondence concerning this service should be sent to Strathprints administrator:mailto:strathprints@strath.ac.ukhttp://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/   Glassey, R. (2004) Location spoofing. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Location-aware Computing, UbiComp 2004, 07-10 Sep 2004, Nottingham, England.   http://eprints.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/1961/     Strathprints is designed to allow users to access the research output of the University of Strathclyde. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in Strathprints to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the url (http://eprints.cdlr.strath.ac.uk) of the Strathprints website.  Any correspondence concerning this service should be sent to The Strathprints Administrator: eprints@cis.strath.ac.uk Location SpoofingRichard GlasseyDepartment of Computer and Information SciencesUniversity of StrathclydeGlasgow, Scotlandrjg@cis.strath.ac.uk1. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHYCurrent research involves investigating the possibilities ofproviding middleware for scalable location-aware comput-ing using spatially distributed object graphs to represent en-tities, relations and locations. Richard Glassey is a PhD stu-dent attending the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, wherehe previously achieved a B.Sc. (Hons) in Computer Science.2. OPINIONAt present, it is possible with existing infrastructure to de-termine the location of people, with varying degrees of pre-cision. Authorities, should they wish too, can monitor mo-bile phone movements, CCTV footage, ATM transactionsand various other means of locating someone. Effectivelythe Orwellian nightmare so vividly described by the mediais all but in place. However people do not yet have reason-able access to their personal location information for theirbenefit. Public resistance to new developments in locationawareness, such as protests against tagging of products insupermarkets, reduces the chance that people will ever seethe benefits. Despite this caution it is possible to look intothe near future, when we begin to fully realise the implica-tions of an information saturated age, where location playsan increasingly important role in making sense of it all.One aspect of interest is how people, given the responsibilityof access control, will manage their location information.Rather than lament about the possible misuse of location formalevolent reasons, this short note discusses how locationspoofing, that is, to blur or lie regarding one’s location, canbe used for benevolent reasons.To BlurFundamental to encouraging the uptake of location-awareapplications is relinquishing the responsibility of access con-trol to the end user. Further, the degree of access must al-low for a spectrum of control from no access to full access.Whilst there will be more than one aspect to access control,the most prominent is controlling the resolution of locationinformation, effectively blurring what is presented.Given a choice of location resolution, city, street, less than20 metres, less than 5 metres, not everyone will choose thesame level. This level will certainly change depending uponthe context we may be in or application we may be using. Ifwe consider a location-aware city guide, the ability to tunethe level of location information in terms of resolution be-comes a very effective way of filtering relevant information.At the city resolution we have access to more abstract in-formation such as an overview of public transport, areas ofimportance and city-wide services. By choosing this levelwe filter information that we are not interested in, such asrestaurants and shops, within our immediate surroundings.However, the converse is also useful when we are attempt-ing to locate a nearby service based on our location. At astreet resolution we only receive information concerning ourimmediate vicinity, thus reducing the effort to find what werequire.Not only will the ability to blur the resolution of locationinformation reassure people that they are in control, it willalso serve a very useful purpose when it comes to filteringlarge quantities of spatial information we will have to face.To LieAt first glance the proposition of lying about one’s location,to serve a legal purpose, seems ridiculous. What decent lawabiding citizen would ever want to lie about where they are,assuming they are willing to take part in an onymous loca-tion system? Surely they must be up to no good. Take theexample of the employee who removes their RFID badge,pins it to their office chair and proceeds to spend the rest ofthe working day relaxing in the park. Short of the rather un-popular implanted ID chips it is very easy to fool the systemregarding your location in this example. So just how couldthe ability to lie about your location prove useful?There are times when we want other people to think weare somewhere we are not. One good example would beleaving our house unoccupied for any period of time. At-tempts to spoof location currently only go as far as timedlight switches or radios left playing, strategies that are eas-ily defeated by burglars. Consider a smart home environ-ment, designed to assist with daily tasks, that also recordssensed movement and activity. This data is used to con-struct a model of behaviour for the home. If the occupantsleave, the smart home can be instructed to use the modelto derive reasonable sequences of behaviour to execute intheir absence, giving the impression of somebody at home.Whilst this example is quite simple, other applications mayalso have to lie about the location of valuable assets for pro-tection against theft.The ability to blur and lie about our location does deserveconsideration and should not be treated as entirely malevo-lent. It will be up to designers to allow the user to have fullresponsibility and freedom over the access control of theirlocation information, rather than force adherence to uncom-fortable regimes of dictated access control.

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Location spoofing

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