Ethical and legal awareness in location-based wireless system design projects

With the advancement of wireless technology, location-based applications are gaining popularity and more demands are made on training students to be proficient in this emerging area. The main idea of these applications is that they will be providing location-specific services to the users based on their physical location. In order to attain this goal, the systems must be able to "track" the location and movement of users, which may lead to a breach of privacy. In this paper, we present the experiences we had on a location-aware application design project involving mainly undergraduate students. We present the ethical and legal issues we faced during the design phase, and how to overcome the obstacles, both from a technical and a policy-based aspect. We also present the lessons learned by the students from working within this new paradigm that they weren't exposed to in other projects, where they have to involve ethical concerns during technical design. Finally, we will provide guidelines for instructors of these projects on how to handle these issues properly.