RE: Why ?

["EXT Eric Crane" <atcm39@cig.mot.com>]

I have been following along with interest and have these points to make:

With all the tunneling going on today, and in the face of the wireless
industry's proposals to tunnel even more for mobile IP users, how do we
determine which IP address in the stack to use for location?  Some of the
inside IP addresses may be private network addresses and resolve into
garbage location information.

Could we look at proposing "layers" of location information?  If you look at
a snail-mail address, there are typically three layers of geographic
information going from specific to broad.  A location request need not
necessarily return the completely defined special location down to the
particle level.

Layers of location information may be extremely useful.  Say an inmate
restriction service could force intimate knowledge of location to be made
public (like the new laws in the US making sex offender's address public).
But other services could provide varying levels of privacy, and a
prospective customer choose an appropriate level of privacy by service, and
even within a service.  SO the customer that buys a phone card is virtually
annonomus, and the customer that signs up for a phone contract must divulge
a billing address.   An ISP or an e-vendor may need to know the legal
jurisdiction of a customer in order to abide by taxation laws.  (Or should
we just have an e-tea party???)  So maybe certain points about location
could be public knowledge such as country or LATA, etc.  But other more
explicit information regarding location such as geophysical coordinates may
be private to the subscriber.

It also occurs to me that the Hiesenburg (sp) uncertainty principle applies
to determining the location of moving objects, such as mobile users.  It may
not be possible to exactly locate a target.

Eric Crane
Motorola, Inc.
Arlington Heights, IL


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-ext-ip-location@research.nokia.com
[mailto:owner-ext-ip-location@research.nokia.com]On Behalf Of EXT Tony
Bartoletti
Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2000 5:06 PM
To: EXT John Lowry; ext-ip-location@research.nokia.com
Subject: Re: Why ?

I would argue that granularity and certainty are linked.  For a given
level of effort, increasing one decreases the other.  But privacy may
(may) be independent. At least one person argued that privacy (AAA
in general) should be separable, a concern only for the choice of
transport mechanism.  Few if any picked up on that thread.

A Question:  If foreseeable technology allows a "target" to withhold
its location information, even from its own service provider, need the
location protocol take heed of this in its design?

In a ubiquitous, wireless mobile future, the only "location" of interest
to the ISP is (and should be?) the "billing address".

Comments?

___tony___

At 05:26 PM 01/06/2000 -0500, EXT John Lowry wrote:
>Is there a list or reasons or concensus as to
>the value of locating IP addresses
>in space ?
>
>It seems to me that identifying those
>issues will quickly frame the questions
>of granularlity, certainty, and privacy.
>
>e.g.:
>
>Cruise Missile Targeting
>         - granularlity: 30 meters
>         - certainty:     high (don't want colateral damage)
>         - privacy:      very 'personal' to the potential target
>
>Ambulance Response
>         - granularlity: also 30 meters
>         - certainty:    moderately high (depends on point of view though)
>         - privacy:      little or none
>
>etc.
>
>
>John
>