Who knows what Willem Wever wants?

Mobile personalised services

Personalisation is something there will always be a demand for, whether that means having your own ringtone or using clothing to create an image or be part of a group. Personalisation of services goes a step further. For example, your supplier could make sure you get only the news that interests you. That might sound good, but it can also get boring, and there are privacy risks involved. Where does the balance lie?

One of the most interesting forms of personalisation is location dependency. Navigation is a well-known example. Another is the Dutch railway journey planner; you can ask it for the next train to Amsterdam and it will tell you the departure times at your nearest station. Take that a step further and you are talking about context-dependent services. Your context describes you: where you are, who you are, what you do, whether you are at work/at home, etc. Context-dependent services offer ultimate personalisation, but you can also choose to (selectively) share your context with others, so creating connectedness. Or you could automatically create a blog of your activities – which would fit neatly within the Hyves and blogging culture. An example of this kind of mobile personalised application is IYOUIT.

Context management as a service is not without societal risks. When you contract out the sharing of your context (in other words, what you are currently doing) to one or more providers, privacy becomes a real issue and trust in your provider is essential.

Privacy

The heart of privacy legislation is that each individual has the right to know what personal information is stored for what purpose (and is entitled to have it modified), and that suppliers must not collect information without permission which is not absolutely essential to the supply of their service. This means that context information may not be collected, let alone shared, willy-nilly. Breakthroughs will therefore be required in tools and methods for privacy protection before context management in its most general form can be widely rolled out.