1 of 2 posts filed under privacy
“Turns out I generate ~500k/day just by walking around with location services on, no messages. That’s quite an information shadow.”
1 of 2 posts filed under privacy
“During certain missions, I would not even take my smartphones. On or off, I did not want to take the chance. Probably made no difference, but it’s better safe than to get our people hurt. It is important that troops make sure that journalists and Interpreters do not take smartphones during certain sorts of missions. Also, if you get blown up, that smartphone might go sailing through the air and be found by the enemy. If they crack into it, they might have a treasure chest. The last unit that I had the honor to cover was 4-4 Cav. They were good about reminding about the smartphones but some other units don’t pay attention.”
— Michael Yon on “Pocket Spies”
1 of 2 posts filed under privacy
“What makes a socialbot different is that it is able to pass itself off as a real Facebook user. The software takes over control of a social networking profile and from there performs basic activities such as posting messages and sending requests.”
1 of 2 posts filed under privacy
Troy Hunt investigated the Park Assist powered car search feature in the Westfield mobile app and found that due to an apparent misconfiguration all the information that was being stored about all the cars in its car park (from 2,550 sensors) was available via a public API.
You can read more on his blog.
(via Dan W)
1 of 2 posts filed under privacy
iPhone Tracker is an open-source application that maps the information that your iPhone is recording about your movements. It doesn’t record anything itself, it only displays files that are already hidden on your computer.
1 of 2 posts filed under privacy
My Little Piece of Privacy by Niklas Roy uses a surveillance camera and an old PC to position a small curtain in just the right spot to prevent passers by looking into his studio.
“The whole setup works really well. But in the end, it doesn’t protect my privacy at all. It seems that the existence of my little curtain is leading itself ad absurdum, simply by doing its job very well. My moving curtain attracts the looks of people which usually would never care about my window. It is even the star of the street, now! My curtain is just engaged. And because of that, it fails.”
1 of 2 posts filed under privacy
BusinessWeeks Stephen Baker explaining (in March 2009) the latest location-tracking software, Sense Networks and Google Latitude, and how companies may target advertisements to users of these programs.
Alongside the obvious privacy issues I think the fear is that services like CitySense that allow you to find out where “people just like you” like to hang out will begin to erode the things that (arguably) make cities so great - like the collision of such a wide range of people.
If you take something like ASBOrometer that uses open government data and your GPS coordinates to display the level of anti social behaviour in the area you’re in* and extend it slightly you could make a route planner app that avoids bad areas of the city. Some people might think that’s a great idea but the effect it could have is that these areas lose their through traffic. People stop noticing, stop caring and we end up making things far worse for the people that live there.
Of course that might not happen - but I definitely think it’s worth bearing in mind.
* There’s league tables and everything.
1 of 2 posts filed under privacy
A user’s guide to the Sentient City Survival Kit by by Mark Shepard.
Serendipitor is available in the iTunes App Store.
1 of 2 posts filed under privacy
Matt Jones talking at Citycamp 10 London about urban computing, vertigo, synecdoche, nearlynets, mujicompfrastructure and how people’s doorways or porches might be a good place to start.
I agree. I think the bottom up approach is almost certainly going to be the way forward unless we want to cause panic. We’ve already had a pretty horrendous top down attempt here in the UK with Chip and Bin.
Sidenote: While I was attempting to find the link for the word synecdoche without knowing how to spell it I stumbled across synectics - which is also great.
