This is my dumping ground for quotes and other stuff relating to the wonderful world of digital & communications.
Many mobile operators offer child-tracking at extra cost, but the number of free tracking applications is growing fast. Life360 rocketed from 1m registered users in 2010 to nearly 26m now. Berg Insight, a research firm, reckons that 70m Americans and Europeans will be tracking family members by 2016
In pursuit of ever more precise and valuable information about potential customers, tracking companies are redefining what it means to be anonymous…Consider Dataium LLC, the company that can track car shoppers like Mr. Morar. Dataium said that shoppers’ Web browsing is still anonymous, even though it can be tied to their names. The reason: Dataium does not give dealers click-by-click details of people’s Web surfing history but rather an analysis of their interests.
Ajax spelers jagen fans de stuipen op het lijf (by adidasfootballtv) Key takeaway — never use the change rooms at a sportstore as you might be secretly filmed and ogled by a bunch of guys. Maybe you can get away with it as a stunt for guys. But I can’t believe they had girls inadvertently strip off too. If this wasn’t a setup, it’s a pretty big invasion of privacy.
Beyond merely tracking where you’ve been and where you are, your smartphone might soon actually know where you are going—in part by recording what your friends do… The method is remarkably accurate. In a study on 200 people willing to be tracked, the system was, on average, less than 20 meters off when it predicted where any given person would be 24 hours later. … (while) the 200 participants might not reflect the general population—they all lived within 30 miles of Lausanne, Switzerland, and were mainly “students, researchers, and people that are fairly predictable anyway… the findings were noteworthy because “we are essentially exploiting the synchronized rhythm of the city” for greater predictive insights.
Norte, a traditional beer popular in northern Argentina, was presented as the choice for young men with “Fotostop” (Photoblocker), beer cooler that detects camera and cell phone flashes. The FotoStop instantly responds with a strong flash, ruining the photo and keeping people safe from embarrassing social network tagging. With Norte Photoblocker, what happens in the club, stays in the club.
Norte Photoblocker (by delcamponazcasaatchi) — cooler buckets that have built in flash detectors and set off a flash of their own whenever someone tries to take a flash photo
yay, well done twitter for publishing this :-)
Wickr, a free application that launched in the iPhone app store Wednesday, aims to encrypt text, picture and video messages to prevent their interception by men-in-the-middle. But then, as the app’s name implies, those messages also delete themselves after just minutes or even seconds like a burning wick, leaving no trace behind even for forensic investigators
If we all start wearing glasses with cameras, the process of seeing and recording will become that much easier and possibly continual… you could set your camera to continually record (and consistently erase) chunks of time…. If something awesome (or horrible) happens that you want to save, you could instruct your Glasses to permanently store that file or upload it to your YouTube account. No more “Whoops, I didn’t get my smartphone out in time to record that!” Imagine how helpful this could be for reporting crimes. If you witnessed a boy being attacked in your yard, or a hit and run, or a robbery, you could immediately upload that file to police databases. Inevitably, we would all become watchmen, critical parts of the surveillance society…. And of course, any time we see something funny, embarrassing, sexual, disgusting, inspiring, or otherwise interesting, we will be able to more easily capture it and tweet it out… It’s creepy. It’s awesome. And it’s increasingly seeming inevitable.
Do Not Track is, at its core, a trade off. It asks of you: Do you prefer ease of use and customized user suggestions or more anonymity from web services? According to Mozilla, 8.6% of desktop Firefox users and 19% of mobile users are choosing the latter, with nearly half of those users reporting they feel more safe surfing the Internet with Do Not Track enabled.
We become cavalier about preservation, not just because Google serves as an outboard brain, but because we are conditioned to assume that the stuff we care about will automatically stick around. You’d think that would be liberating. And, for the most part, it is. (The history! The timeline! The cloud!) But there are also drawbacks to digital omniscience. It’s telling that people diagnosed with hyperthymesia have described their limitless memories not as blessings, but as burdens — ones that are “non-stop, uncontrollable, and totally exhausting.” Near-perfect recall of their experiences doesn’t make these people smarter; it makes them miserable. Same deal, to a large extent, with the web. That’s one reason people decry “information overload,” not to mention a reason for proposals of digital sabbaths and the like…
The next wave of digital products won’t just be about archiving the web; they’ll be about destroying the archive.
6 percent of adult Americans admit to having sent a “sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude photo or video” using a cellphone. Another 15 percent have received such material. Three percent of teenagers admit to sending sexually explicit content.
if you have a conversation with someone behind closed doors, it’s considered private; the government can’t listen in without first obtaining a warrant and making a showing of probable cause. But if you have a conversation in a public place where it can be overheard by others, it’s not protected… What this means is that the degree of protection individuals have in their privacy depends a great deal on the degree of protection they themselves expect and preserve. To the degree that we ourselves act in ways that give up our privacy, the law will follow and give us less protection from government intrusion.
The ENISA study is the largest laboratory experiment in the field of privacy economics to date. Four-hundred and forty-three participants were invited to a lab in Berlin, and were asked to buy movie tickets from one of two online sites. By default, each company asked for names, birth dates and email addresses. One of the companies asked for additional information - a mobile phone number. In exchange, participants were charged 50 Euro cents less (approximately 65 cents U.S.). Of the participants, only one in three (or 29%) paid extra in order to not submit their cellphone number. A tiny 9% paid to avoid receiving marketing emails. Price differences aside, 80% went with the company that collected less personal data. On the whole, 74% of Europeans say that they believe disclosing personal data is an increasing part of modern life. Only 43% say they have been asked for more data than necessary when trying to obtain access to an online service. According to ENISA, 47% of service providers treated personal data as a commercial asset; 48% admitted to sharing data with third parties.
