I may be off here, but my first observation is that the government seems to be getting its act together earlier than usual this time around on the LBS side of things… COPPA was put in play in 1998, maybe a half decade AFTER online marketing to kids really started to be mainstream… and web behavioral targeting has been an active practice now for well over a decade. But arguably mobile location aware ad serving has yet to really arrive in any meaningful way, yet it’s already getting some attention among those government organizations that start with a capital F. Potentially the industry has learned its lesson that it’s far better to get out in front of stuff like this in areas that we know are going to be a hot button.

Kudos to our government for 1. being proactive in addressing such things and 2. opting to take the wait and see self-regulation route first before imposing some heavy handed and unnecessarily restrictive policies that would stop innovation dead in its tracks.

A quick Control F (search) on the newly released FTC Self Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising reveals that the commenters to the commission recommend putting
“precise geographic location” data in a “sensitive” information category that “deserves some form of heightened protection” which would put it in the same category as “information about children and adolescents, medical information, financial information and account numbers, Social Security numbers, sexual orientation information, government-issued identifiers”

The location awareness issues here are somewhat familiar from the years of online behavioral targeting (transparency, consumer control, express consent, how long to hold data), but more complex for mobile location awareness which includes issues related to location accuracy, real time data vs delayed data, device owner versus user rights, and the more muddled stack of understanding who controls and sees what on a mobile device (carrier, device, platform, application, business operator?).

In one of my more ambitious days I registered awhere.org for the purposes of addressing some of these issues for not just advertising but general LBS development… but I fell asleep shortly after starting.