Title: INTRODUCTION

Introduction

Mobility and Location Based Services (LBS) play an increasing role in everybody’s life. Their spectrum of application covers services for entertainment purposes as well as services that aim at increasing the efficiency of business processes or help in case of emergency.  

Consequently LBS have a major impact on the identity of a person as described and explained in Chapter 3, that gives an overview of the different LBS application areas by describing three exemplary use cases and their implications. Then in Chapter 4 the context awareness of mobile services and especially of LBS and their consequences for users’ mobile identities is discussed.

Following up on the new technological opportunities, new economies and products appear on the horizon. Tracking and tracing is becoming more and more a commercial product. This development is based on a technical evolvement of positioning technologies and their diffusion. Mobile devices are increasingly featured with software and hardware modules that enable them to use decentralized technologies like GPS, Bluetooth or W-LAN to determine their position. Also the development of more centralized network based positioning methods progresses. Chapter 5 gives an overview about the different positioning methods and puts a focus on the precision of the obtained positioning information.

Obviously the enhanced positioning precision holds also risks, e.g. for the privacy of citizens and users. Therefore in Chapter 6 the European Data Protection Framework is observed with a special focus on the LBS relevant legal aspects. The deliverable concludes in Chapter 7 with a summary and an outlook.