Slashdot Mirror
Map As Metaphor In a Location-Aware Mobile World
mattnyc99 writes "Two weeks after the launch of Google Latitude, your inbox is probably full of requests and privacy advocates probably have even more concerns than they did at first. But some tech pundits are already seeing the bigger picture of a digital lifestyle based around the always-on, GPS-based mobile map. The NYTimes's John Markoff has a great piece in today's Science Times about the map as metaphor for a time when 'future systems will probably begin to blur the boundaries between the display and the real world.' Over at Esquire.com's Tech Therapist, Erik Sofge talks to the geek behind Latitude and offers a similar reality check: 'Latitude will be precisely as annoying as e-mail and social networking sites and cell phones themselves — and just as useful. What won't stop Latitude, or the wider rollout of location-based tracking, is bitching about it. These are juggernauts of free, culture-reorienting technology. And you and me, we are but posts on the massive Facebook profile of history.'"
What was the problem with just having a small checkbox for being included in the tracking or not? And why can't we trust companies anymore? I may not be the most up to date, but come on, I've never heard about google doing something questionable with your data.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
Privacy is so pre-millennium.
Anyone who values their privacy won't sign up for this. In related news, I've also deleted my facebook. Anyone who's been following the tech news knows what they are aiming for. People want databases that know everything about you at all times, since somehow this data will change the world for the better. Such databases will inevitably be abused; people who disagree need to take a few history classes. I'm sick of the data mining and invasions of privacy that are done already.
I, for one, do NOT welcome our new convenience enhancing privacy eating overlords.
Privacy does NOT have to be made obsolete by new technologies, but people would have you think so.
These people can be cured, but ammunition prices are relatively high now and going higher.
Set some aside now, you'll thank yourself when they come to brand you with a bar code.
Latitude will be precisely as annoying as e-mail and social networking sites and cell phones themselves â" and just as useful.
So it will be 67% useful?
...who doesn't mind the small breach of privacy, plus a few ads on the side, in order to provide myself and possibly some friends some interesting and beneficial functionality?
Oh sure there's the possibility that a corporation/stalker will be watching me at all times, but hey, stalkers sometimes have free candy (and they offer me rides in their van!).
And of course the following joke is now obsolete: A doctor, a lawyer, and a mathematician are all hanging out at the bar. They all went got their undergraduate degrees from the same institution, so they have been good friends for quite while, but their interests were a bit divergent. Somehow or another, they get to talking about relationships. The lawyer proclaims that, while he is not married, he has a beautiful mistress.
"It is far better to have a mistress than a wife," he says. "A mistress is never going to divorce you and take your money, and if you get tired of her, you can dump her and find someone younger and more attractive. I don't understand why anyone would ever want to get married!"
The doctor responds, "I must say that I disagree. I have been happily married for 15 years, and I just can't see any other way to live. I have my wife's nearly unconditional love, and she is there for me whether I am healthy or not. She takes care of me, and I take care of her, and there is no chance that she is just going to leave me one day. I would much rather have the steady, warm relationship of a wife than the flash-in-the-pan mistress."
The mathematician comments, "You are both wrong. It is best to have both a wife and a mistress. Then you can tell your wife that you are with your mistress, tell your mistress that you are with your wife, and you can go into the office and get some work done."
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Once we let computers start to think for us. It's really only a matter of time. I highly recommend "I, Robot" - the book, not the lame movie. The final section is +1, Insightful.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
What will stop it, is people not using it. Or far more likely, people not using it in ways that the pundits and marketdroids insist it must be used.
History is full examples of technology that simply were not used. But more common are examples of technology being used in ways no one ever foresaw. I have no doubt that location-awareness will be ubiquitous in future culture, but I'm willing to bet good money that it WON'T be used the way the babbling class tells us it's going to be used.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
>Two weeks after the launch of Google Latitude, your inbox is probably full of requests
Mine isn't. I don't think any of my friends have even heard of it. Not everyone jumps on the latest social trend as soon as it's announced. I still don't know anyone who uses Twitter.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
...but that's because Google has the data. But let me tell you my vision of the future:
In about 20 years, everyone will be recording not only their movements, but basically everything they do. Audio at first and then video. This, however, will not be public information, it will be either stored on a device under the user's control at their house, or with a company that promises not to look at it or turn it over except in case of a warrant. (Google's just a problem because it doesn't promise this.) It will probably be via 'cell phone' at first, although it will probably subsume cell phones in the end.
Why would people do this? To stop crime. Not them committing crime, other people committing crimes against them, and to demonstrate that they were not the person who committed a crime. The first hardware like this will come with a panic button, which would send the last two minutes of audio, plus a live stream, and your location to the police. This will quickly evolve into ways of monitoring to see if you're in distress.
They will also have various other features. By that time, voice recognition should be workable so expect transcribed conversation, and expect the ability to look up information simply by talking about it. Expect a 'distress' code phrase to replace the panic button.
Expect it to automatically recognize when you're supposed to be meeting someone and work with the other person's device to navigate you two together, or even if you're not meeting but happen to be near each other and are friends. Likewise, expect the ability to tell the device to lie so you don't have to talk to that boring guy who thinks you're friends.
And let me clarify that by 'vision' I mean 'What I see happening', not 'Grand and noble scheme'. It's not what should happen or what I want to happen. I'd actually rather dislike it. I'd like the Supreme Court to decide that we have the right to record ourselves without it being subject to a search. At the very least it should be minimized...if the police assert you committed a crime at a specific time you should be able to demonstrate the recorder has you somewhere else without specifically stating where or what you were doing at that time.
Basically, think Brin's transparent society, but instead of society recording everyone, and showing it to everyone, like he hypothesizes, or the police recording everyone which is the worse case scenario, everyone would simply be recording themselves and be able to produce a recording for themselves. And various parts of that would be automatically accessible to other people.
Oh, and incidentally, I know that such a device would be illegal in many states, thanks to laws about audio recording. The laws will very quickly change to let you record anything you could have heard with normal hearing. (Laws outlawing the recording of something you could be sitting there transcribing are pretty surreal to start with.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
This is just a way to make this type of surveilance socially acceptable. In a while the government will ask you to open up the info to them (what do you have to hide after all?). It is not my intention to go through life as an ant in a terrarium, ready to be prodded with a stick if I move the wrong way. It is not anybodies 'right' to know more about me than I care to actively share.
We will now know where the "kitchen sink" is located. Our next metaphor mapping adventure is where the "other shoe drop" is located. :P
So why must a system which connects me with my friends be centralized? People who treat the internet like interactive TV don't know better, but techies should not get excited about centralized Google services. P2P is the future if you don't want to wake up to Google turned Microsoft one day.
Pot of gold! Where's the pot of gold!?!?!?!
Helio had this available in 2006 They called it "Buddy Beacon":
Buddy Beacon is the new way for Helio members to synchronize their social lives and tell friends where the fun is. Rather than calling or texting, Helio members can switch on their Buddy Beacon and use satellite technology to broadcast their location to the friends they add to their Buddy List. When they turn on Buddy Beacon, their Buddy List friends can see their location on a map along with a nearby address. Members can add up to 25 Buddies to their Buddy List. When members change locations and want to let everyone know the party is on the move, one simple command refreshes the location. Want to hide out? Just leave Buddy Beacon off to enjoy a night of privacy or to slip out the back of the club into the VIP room."
That's been out since 2006. It's been available for the iPhone since April 2008. Google is late to the party on this.
...So google already has my location data anyway. This new service gives them no more information than they already had. Instead, it simply allows me to share that data with select parties when I find it convenient.
My wife and I plan to give "Latitude" a spin. She gets lost driving in the city now and then, and gets flustered. Being able to see her location in google maps, and give talk her through directions from there should come in handy.
Same old story. Every generation uses new technology, while the old generation wrings its hands and whines about the good old days. If you don't want to embrace the future, then don't. It's up to you. But don't fool yourself that it's anything other than fear of things you haven't grown up with.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Yes. The problem is the people who use technology to allow other people to destroy my privacy in new, much more brutally efficient ways. Only because the first set of people really want to gather, aggregate and analyze as much information as possible about me, in order to use it against my advantage.
Are you adequate?
Nobody reads snowcrash anymore?
It's like so 1992.
Earth, the metaphor... for... all the information useful for people living on earth...
So simple... it's brilliant.
I'm already paying $52/mo for my Verizon voice/texting/Mobile Web plan. No way am I paying an extra $40-60/mo to add data onto that just so I can tell everyone my GPS coordinates. :-)
Good thing the DMCA has been abolished so this will work now.
I signed up for it, using the web UI... set the address to the address of my office (easy enough to find anyway) and my icon's been sitting there the past 3 weeks. Ooh, comma, wow.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
What is it exactly that you are afraid of?
Are you afraid of some guy browsing facebook discovering your true identity and hunting you down through use of his GPS navigation system in order to use you for whatever his master evil plan may be?
John Markoff is a jerk. He needs to spend 4 years in Los Angles County jail and write a story about that. Why the New York Times has kept a dishonest reporter like him around disappoints me. Sorry Markoff, you made your career by fucking someone else and leaving them in jail. Sleep good tonight. Post Anonymously - Checked
WTF does "Map As Metaphore" even mean?
I looked it up on google and the only search results returned were this article and a couple other completely unrelated research papers.
I don't think "Map As Metaphore" is even a grammatically correct phrase.
Who comes up with this bullshit?
Not only is the service opt-in and very clear about what you're opting into, but I received an email a couple of days later reminding me that I was broadcasting my location.
It's hard to have privacy concerns about something you choose to do that is so straightforward about what it does.
Well, I dunno about you but *I'd* be afraid of some guy browsing Facebook, discovering a picture of my wife, then using a GPS mapping system to predict the best time/place to assault or kidnap her... and yes, there are many guys who troll social networking sites and try to crack on to any decent looking woman (clearly states on both our pages that we're married and not looking for anything, she still gets one or two a month saying "hey baby you up for a fling"). It's not that much of a reach to say that the small percentage of them who are actually psychotic and not just sleazy will find this sort of thing very useful indeed.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
I might be afraid of a potential employer knowing too much about me.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
What the fuck does that mean?
Just because your paranoid doesn't mean I'm not after you.
After a lot of looking around, I found the uncharted territory (it was tough, being off all maps, natch) and it has a nice cave, but a weird foreign-looking guy named Mr Bin Laden told me to fuck off, he got there first.
you had me at #!
If I had a phone with GPS (which I don't) and I signed up for Latitude, and you even somehow had my cell phone number, you would not be able to find my location (which would be the location I told google to share, which might not be my CURRENT location) that is unless I added you as people allowed to see it... It's similar to IM
On the other hand.. If I have a facebook account, or some other type of online social account that reveals enough details, then you might be able to figure out who I really am, and where I live, and follow me with out my knowledge.
I am sure there are people strange enough (oohh so social) to even try and tie the two together.. regardless of that, I think Latitude could be useful for 2 or more people exploring a city they might be unfamiliar with.. For example, if some friends and I were in say Germany, and I found someplace I would like them to meet me. It would be easier for me to send them my location, than it might be to try and find out the address and how to get there.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
Wait, didn't we make the leap from "allow you to update your friends" to "everyone's location will be mandatorily broadcast for easier surveillance^H^H^H^H^H^Hyour convenience"? I thought we were talking scary big brother world, not nifty new feature world. :P
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Am I the only one who thought about the clock in the Wesley's kitchen when first heard about these online positioning systems?
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Can anyone shed a light on why European G1's despite having Android version 1.1, still don't have Latitude? I have a coworker with an old Nokia business phone, and he has access to it. So it can't be the fact that they are holding an European release.
the battery life on my blackberry has gone to complete shit. If I exit Google Maps but leave Latitude enabled, my battery barely lasts a day. Understood it's constantly using the GPS to update, but maybe they need to change the frequency of the polling.
--> Rakeem writes:
I think readers of Slashdot should bear this in mind when evaluating anything penned by Markoff:
From the front page of the New York Times, Markoff led the nation on a mendacious, sensationalist national witch-hunt, deliberately distorting the public's perception of Mitnick as an individual and the scope of the threat he posed.
The extent to which Markoff's self-serving bullshit pervaded the judicial system is self-evident through the series of ill-informed, clucking, panic stricken court rulings which made Mitnick legal history, incarcerating him for more than four YEARS, including almost a year in solitary confinement, *WITHOUT TRIAL*.
For Markoff, this appalling miscarriage of justice was collateral at best. His cynically contrived, third-rate hyperbole netted him a *$hitload*, including a so-shite-it's-funny Hollywood movie and multiple book deals, all unashamedly "based on" Markoff's fervid, and fantastically juvenile, characterisations of Mitnick and little else.
That dick never once spoke up for Kevin. He certainly knew what was going on and it suited him fine.
Google the 2600 crew's "Freedom Downtime" for the feature length version of this idiocy.
John Markoff, you sir, are a prick. I hope that something truly awful and tragic happens to you soon.
Rakeem --
I hate how people FUD Google and others for making things available that others have collected for years.
... the ruling elite. The exact same group who wish to exploit others for their own gain, as they seek power. (They spend their lives learning how to gain and hold on to power over others, because if they don't then others will at their expense. That is the world view of politicians. Regardless of their party view, because the underlying psychology that is driving them is always the same, to seek power and prevent others having power over them. Its an endless game of power seeking for them).
Most privacy is simply privacy via obscurity. By centralizing and organizing the data, privacy is removed.
The question then becomes why do people want privacy. Privacy is effectively protection via obscurity.
Which moves the point on to why do people feel the need for protection from some other people. Once you answer that question, it becomes obvious why people do not want to trust corporations (like Google) to offer protection and privacy.
There are some people in this world who want to exploit others. Corporations want to exploit people for profit. Governments want to exploit people to gain and hold onto power. Its all about personal gain. They are more interested in their personal gain, than they are in caring about other people. (The world economic news in the past 6 months has been filled with examples of their selfcentred and selfserving behavior).
(If you want to change your world view, then check out this documentary about Corporations. The world isn't as Utopian as you currently wish to believe it is and you need to see through your Utopian view for your own protection from their behavior). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa3wyaEe9vE
If we lived in a utopia, then Google style massive information collection on everyone wouldn't be a danger, as no one would seek to exploit it. But we don't and never will live in a utopia. There will always be some people who will seek to exploit others for their own gain.
"it needs to be fought with good privacy laws."
So who do you think makes the laws?
"If we keep freedom in mind, the right answers will come"
Thats a wonderful Utopian view, but the world isn't like that. Some people in this world don't want others to have freedom, as they seek to be the people in power over others. Any act of seeking power over others, requires them to remove power from someone else and so restrict some freedom of the person being ruled over. So they don't have freedom in mind. They have power in mind. They are thinking along the lines of "How can I gain and hold onto power over others". That is why knowledge is power, as some people wish to use knowledge about other people, to give them power over them. There will always be some people who will seek to exploit others for their own gain regardless of if they seek to gain money or seek to gain power over others.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
None of these systems have a checkbox too stop my idiot sister forwarding crap to me and implicitly enrolling me in her facebook centric lifestyle.
I can turn it off but I can't turn off the people who turn it on.
The only submission of mine to make it was about this exact point. Bluntly put, I was told to shut up, quit being such a luddite, and drop any pretence of having any privacy in the first place.
But I'm still not on Facebook, nor do I plan to. On the contrary, I'm looking interestedly at things like the Appleseed project which have the right attitude (but not much traction).
"Good news, everyone!"
What the hell... Slashdot is fucked. Every time I submit comments I get "you must wait a little while before using this resource". Ummmmmmmmm.
1. I didn't post any other comments in the last HOUR
2. How long is "a little bit" because I come back in 10 minutes and it still says that? Rob, you fucking idiot. Fix your broken SHIT. I don't even care about the comment itself now, but your goddamn lame site requires me to make point. Way to jizz it up with the 2.0 interface too.
--------
"And you and me, we are but posts on the massive Facebook profile of history."
STOP!
I am not a post on any Facebook anything. I'm not associated with Facebook in any way. I have never visited the site. I don't have a profile. My name doesn't even exist on anyone ELSE's profile. And it's bloody well going to stay that way until I die, become pure energy, or transfer my consciousness to a cybernetic host (at which points I won't care).
In summary, I hate Facebook. I hate the idea of Facebook. Mainly because I feel that as a whole, Facebook exposes the non-admirable parts of the human psyche. Like narcissism. IMNAAHO, 100% of people who have established a profile on Facebook have narcissistic tendencies. "It's just for fun" you say? Hahahaha. Why is it fun? `Cause you're a narcissist. You derive some kind of sick jollies by reading about yourself, or living vicariously through other's profiles. Why don't you develop a fucking ego that isn't enslaved to others' approval, you pathetic worms! The only drawback is it makes you a jerk. But once you're a jerk, you don't care that you're a jerk, cause you're a jerk.
Wow, Appleseed seems interesting. With some luck, the mere fact that it's "distributed" might buy SOME privacy improvements. After all, Google standing astride their ocean of data is where the trouble comes in. Re-read, substituting "Facebook" for "Google" and it's still true.
By the way, Project Appleseed stalled over a year ago, though perhaps a little slashdotting might help? See http://appleseed.sourceforge.net/theory/future.php for his manifesto.
Appleseed gets it mostly Right on paper -- but it's hardly successful in the real world.
In comparison, projects like Elgg are more successful even though they seem to be designed to be walled gardens. Strange. Well, not really strange, just "only useful within confined spaces". But Elgg is just one example out of many; all of which fail the criterion of being able to talk to each other (the one core feature of Appleseed).
The problem with Facebook, and Google (for all their goodness) is that even though they arguably do a lot of good, they keep it all very close to their own turf. All of Google's solutions integrate with one another; that's only natural and good business sense. In a social context, openness and trust should weigh heavier than they currently do, and wanting to do business tends to be an opposing force. That's why we need an open redesign, and that's what grass-root projects like Appleseed and FOAF are trying to do.
The problem is aptly explained by Mark Zuckerberg as "There is no system today that enables me to share my email address with you and then simultaneously lets me control who you share it with and also lets you control what services you share it with" and "When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are createdâ"one in the person's sent messages box and the other in their friend's inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message".
I disagree. Okay, it's true enough that that's how Facebook works, but saying that "there is no system" is just too narrow-minded. If you think of different social sites as different tables in a relational database (which is really no huge abstraction), then you will see that, when Alice for instance grabs Bobs email address, all I really get is a link to it. In Mark's example, Bob cancels his account and Alice retains his address; in a relational system the link would die and her "file" on Bob would diminish. But that's just looking at one perspective, another is that, when Bob updates his email address, then all his friends will automatically use the new one because they are relying on a living link instead of a static copy. There's good stuff all around in this model.
"All" that's needed is a standardized way to take this relational model and "solve" it in the sense that the records and tables are all over the place and need protocols to talk to one another.
I believe that's what the Appleseed project is trying to do. And yes, that's a one-man show, one that's been lying dormant for some time, but that's no measure of it's quality or it's potential. The Friend of a Friend project is in the same sort of state. They may not need anything but a little PR!
"Good news, everyone!"