News outlets talk up technologies that personalize by tracking your location

While people have long taken psychological control of their chaotic environment through the escape of books or music players, for example, cell phones present a new threat to the distinction between public and private spaces. A December 2010 study followed "four months of news from major world and US [periodicals] addressing location-based services (LBS)" in order to determine the prevailing media opinion toward personalized technology regarding benefits versus security risks. The main privacy concern that news articles mention is the possibility of having one's location available to "unknown parties," since this would constitute a loss of control over one's own whereabouts. Yet, the tradeoff for that risk is users' increased control over their "interaction with public spaces." The new LBS technologies are changing the way that consumers understand their privacy and control in relation to their surroundings. The three embodiments of "location awareness" that the researchers identified in their news subjects were advertising/marketing, social networking, and safety and security. Additionally, the two themes that cropped up in relation to LBS technologies were loss-of-privacy concerns and control/personalization of public spaces. Just as many news outlets treated the privacy issue of LBS positively as neutrally and negatively combined. Meanwhile, 25 of those sampled spoke positively about LBS's control aspects in contrast to 3 neutrally and 3 negatively. Security was less discussed in relation to both privacy and control, with only 5 and 4 news sources covering them, respectively. However, the two combinations most considered were control in marketing and advertising, and privacy in social networking, with 16 instances each. Privacy in advertising and control in social networking were the next most important topics, garnering the attention of 10 and 12 news stories, respectively.