My iPhone tracks me

21 Apr

21 April 2011

The world today was rocked by the sensational revelation that the iPhone is tracking our whereabouts and storing the coordinates in a file on its operating system. I found this terribly fascinating, unlike most of the population. Sure, there are privacy concerns and Apple needs to explain why it is they’ve been storing this information to begin with, but is it really a surprise? Unless it comes out that this information was being transmitted outside the phone, I would hope that most iPhone users greet this news with cautious interest and take a moment to load their location information into the iPhone Tracker software the researchers that released this news have developed.

I suppose I’m a bit used to this, though. Google Latitude, an app in my browser and iPhone, has been tracking my location since it was released. I’ve enabled it and disabled periodically, but it has a rather detailed history of my precise movements since June 2010 (yet another reason I use two-step verification on my Google account). It’s not public, and I don’t broadcast it. My immediate family uses it and that’s it – my Mom calls it her Weasley Clock, after the magical device from the Harry Potter series. Read more →

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My social network is smaller than yours

15 Nov

15 November 2010

I don’t know about you, but I don’t know my Facebook friends. Well, I know who they are, but I don’t “know” them…most of them, anyway. I knew them at one point, and some I still know. Some of them I know too well. Still, the vast majority of my Facebook “friends” are long gone from my life, hanging around through occasional status updates or stalking sessions. I don’t really have a problem with this – it is what it is.

I’ve long wondered if there would be some major shift in the way people operate online – away from the “share all” culture to a “share a little” mentality – or at least to “share with a few” policy. Software code originally forced us to share with everyone and we accepted it. Then they let us scale it down to “friend lists” but it has been slow to catch on. Now, we’re seeing the anti-social networks emerge. The first I’ve actually liked is Path, released today. Read more →

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/0 Tweets/posted in Feature, Internet, Technology, Tips

A Modern Looking Glass

17 Oct

17 October 2010

Allow me to geek out a bit. This isn’t anything all that new, but I’d never seen it for myself and thought I’d share a little.

Have you ever been walking down the sidewalk or standing in a square and wondered what you were looking at? Perhaps a bit about the architecture, the history of a particular building, or whether that restaurant with that great happy hour deal is in fact any good?

Enter Augmented Reality. These applications for iPhone, Android and others use the phone’s camera, GPS, accelerometer and compass to overlay graphical information on the live camera view. Hold the camera up to the building, and peer through the looking glass to reveal the dense world of information behind it.

On my way home from the gym yesterday, I stopped in Trafalgar Square to give acrossair a spin…literally. See my photos below with Wikipedia entries floating about. You can also display Yelp reviews, bars, subways and more. Really incredible stuff. I look forward to (read: dread) wearing contact lenses that do the same thing in a few years.