Wednesday - January 28, 2009

Privacy? You Doan Nee No Steenkin Privacy

Part 1, sort of

Resistance is futile. Take the pledge; remember: ”Together we can. Together we ARE. And together we will be the Change that we seek.” Fucking zombies. Get wired. Like a puppet on a string. Then dance for your new master, whom you have just pledged to serve. It’s cool to be a slave.

UPDATE: Folks, watch the video at the above zombies link please.




Part 2, kinda

Welcome to the future. And it sucks. No thanks.

Mathew Honan explores the perks and the perils of being part of the open source generation.

The location-aware future—good, bad, and sleazy—is here. Thanks to the iPhone 3G and, to a lesser extent, Google’s Android phone, millions of people are now walking around with a gizmo in their pocket that not only knows where they are but also plugs into the Internet to share that info, merge it with online databases, and find out what—and who—is in the immediate vicinity. That old saw about how someday you’ll walk past a Starbucks and your phone will receive a digital coupon for half off on a Frappuccino? Yeah, that can happen now.

Simply put, location changes everything. This one input—our coordinates—has the potential to change all the outputs. Where we shop, who we talk to, what we read, what we search for, where we go—they all change once we merge location and the Web.

I wanted to know more about this new frontier, so I became a geo-guinea pig. My plan: Load every cool and interesting location-aware program I could find onto my iPhone and use them as often as possible. For a few weeks, whenever I arrived at a new place, I would announce it through multiple social geoapps. When going for a run, bike ride, or drive, I would record my trajectory and publish it online. I would let digital applications help me decide where to work, play, and eat. And I would seek out new people based on nothing but their proximity to me at any given moment. I would be totally open, exposing my location to the world just to see where it took me. I even added an Eye-Fi Wi-Fi card to my PowerShot digital camera so that all my photos could be geotagged and uploaded to the Web. I would become the most location-aware person on the Internets!

To test whether I was being paranoid, I ran a little experiment. On a sunny Saturday, I spotted a woman in Golden Gate Park taking a photo with a 3G iPhone. Because iPhones embed geodata into photos that users upload to Flickr or Picasa, iPhone shots can be automatically placed on a map. At home I searched the Flickr map, and score—a shot from today. I clicked through to the user’s photostream and determined it was the woman I had seen earlier. After adjusting the settings so that only her shots appeared on the map, I saw a cluster of images in one location. Clicking on them revealed photos of an apartment interior—a bedroom, a kitchen, a filthy living room. Now I know where she lives.

A couple years ago this was scary. Now it’s so far beyond being old hat that few people even realize it’s wrong. It’s a convenience feature, dammit, and they demand this level of connection and service!! (Ok, this doesn’t actually exist yet. But it’s nothing compared to the technological power shown above. All it would take is a flip of a switch, one that already exists, to make public that information that you can only pray is still “private”. And Bush was Hitler because of the wiretap thing. Riiiight.)

Posted by Drew458     on 01/28/2009 at 12:01 AM   
Filed Under: • Obama, The One • Scary Stuff • Science-Technology •  
• Comments (7) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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