User-centered location awareness

The inclusion of GPS reception in mobile phones is rapidly enabling a wide variety of location-aware personal communication applications. Most of these empower users to share an increasing array of data by alerting incoming drivers of a major accident or congestion on the highway. Despite the possible benefits of location-tracking technology, many potential users find it threatening. A user-centered model in which location information is encoded into forms that have little meaning to outsiders is a way to address this security challenge.