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!
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.
...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.
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?
We will now know where the "kitchen sink" is located. Our next metaphor mapping adventure is where the "other shoe drop" is located. :P
People are so quick to forget: 9/11 changed everything.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
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.
...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.
Do you know what a non-sequitur is? If Facebook didn't exist (and believe it or not, there was a time when it didn't), his sister would be just putting the pictures up on her website.. or on the wall of her cubical at work. He might well be opposed to that too.
And those might be annoying but nothing worse.
The reason something like facebook or google is a problem is that ALL the information in the network is owned by one entity, linked together and tagged in ways that a bunch of independant websites and personal blogs never could be. Tons of data in aggregate, actively being linked together by the very users being monitored is far more than the simple sum of its parts.
A few pics on the web of me, a couple in the foreground, and a couple in the background of other people photos is meaningless. But take enough of those pictures, put them together, link them and put them into a cohesive context and piles of new information starts falling out, even if NONE of it was explicitly written.
It goes from there's you at the beach with some girl. To "He's been dating that girl for about 6 years." (from seeing that girl start showing up regularly in photos 6 years ago)
They had child. -- She gradually becomes pregnant in the 3rd year pics.
He works at X, She works at Y. == Random pics of them at work with coworkers. Misc corporate branding in background, plus multiple pictures of those coworkers around a particular building. You are never in a picture outside at work, but based on who your coworkers are and the fact that a high number of them are pictured with this building and the building features the corporate branding means its probably your place of work. The building address is pulled via a correlation with streetview.
He drives an X. Its plate number is Y. - oops you got caught in a pic with your car a few times, and a couple had your plates. It happens. But now its all linked to your profile.
He lives in city A. - pictures of you at home, correlated to an address via streetview.
She moved in on date B. - again more picture trending.
The child goes to school at C - more correlations. pics of your kid on stage that other parents took of their kids, where those other kids parents tagged the school. Software matches your child's face to pics of your child at the beach your sister uploaded...
The school at Address D...
You went as a family to see Coraline 3D -- Caught in the background of a cell phone pic someone else uploaded to facebook, and tagged as a visit to coraline. Your faces were matched to those already in your profile. So even though you never told anyone you went, you get caught on some cell phone pic by complete strangers and its linked to your profile. Everyone who has access to the profile knows you were there.
Think that could happen if all these pictures were uploaded to dozens of different providers. Sure someone might randomly stumble upon the image who happens to know you. But the odds of it getting linked back to your profile are astronomically small.
The odds of anything that can be related or correlated to you from any content anyone anywhere ever uploads about anyone to a site like facebook is only a question of time as the data mining and facial recognition, and raw mass of data increases.
All online. All the web of associations and inferences already mapped out from a vast collection of data.
And all so entirely boring that people are happy to provide that information to you over a cup of tea.
That was just the beginning. And even that is far more than most people would be comfortable with absolutely *everyone* being able to know.
You apply for car insurance, and are charged extra because they analyze all the places your car has been seen parked and decide you are high risk...
You apply for life insurance, and are charged extra because they analyze all the places you have been seen, and decide you are higher risk...
You cut off the wrong jerk on the freeway, and your 6 year old daughter gets a threatening phone call at school...
What is your point?
The there is a MASSIVE difference between being in the background of a picture in someone's cubicle, and having every photo of you ever taken being indexed along with millions of photos of others and thoroughly data-mined. Anyone who suggests they are equivalent is an idiot.
A little data is meaningless. A lot of data becomes information. Facebook and Google have scary amounts of data to mine for information.
You apply for car insurance, and are charged extra because they analyze all the places your car has been seen parked and decide you are high risk...
You apply for life insurance, and are charged extra because they analyze all the places you have been seen, and decide you are higher risk...
If you're a higher risk you *should* get charged more.. because if you're not getting charged more than *I* am getting charged more.
You cut off the wrong jerk on the freeway, and your 6 year old daughter gets a threatening phone call at school...
And? That is possible and scary but not nearly as scary as the idea of your 6 year old daughter having a phone.. freak.
A little data is meaningless. A lot of data becomes information. Facebook and Google have scary amounts of data to mine for information.
And what is your point? What is so terrible about having targeted advertising? If they can ever get the shit to work I might actually have a chance of seeing an ad for a product that I would actually like to buy!
Can you make an argument or do I have to make it for you? Maybe what you're trying to say is that data collected for such a harmless purpose as targeted advertising can be abused. Well boo hoo, you deal with the abusers.. you don't try to enforce your paranoia on everyone else - if you're not interested in giving out personal information, don't, but other people are free to give out whatever information they want and yes, that includes information about you. The world can not bend over backwards to accommodate your personal preferences.
How we know is more important than what we know.
If you're a higher risk you *should* get charged more.. because if you're not getting charged more than *I* am getting charged more.
Except that its *you* getting charged more because *you* were deemed higher risk than me. If they get good enough at predicting who will need an expensive payout, they'll just stop insuring those people. Insurance is supposed to be about covering the risk of things you can't control.
And? That is possible and scary but not nearly as scary as the idea of your 6 year old daughter having a phone.. freak.
No. They'd call the school, moron.
if you're not interested in giving out personal information, don't, but other people are free to give out whatever information they want and yes, that includes information about you. The world can not bend over backwards to accommodate your personal preferences.
The world can easily bend over backwards to make collecting and correlating data about me without my express permission illegal. If other people want to submit information about me, fine, but they don't have to keep it. They don't have to index it. They don't have to data mine it.
Except that its *you* getting charged more because *you* were deemed higher risk than me. If they get good enough at predicting who will need an expensive payout, they'll just stop insuring those people. Insurance is supposed to be about covering the risk of things you can't control.
So you're saying that insurance companies should not access risk now? Please, put down the crack pipe.
No. They'd call the school, moron.
You don't even have kids do ya? Anyone who put a 6 year old kid on the phone with someone claiming to be a parent would not be working with children for long.
The world can easily bend over backwards to make collecting and correlating data about me without my express permission illegal. If other people want to submit information about me, fine, but they don't have to keep it. They don't have to index it. They don't have to data mine it.
No... in order to do that we have to make a law, and enforce it. That aint free. It's paid for by "the rest of us" and we don't give two shits about your preference to be un-data-mined. Go live in the freaking woods. Become a sailor.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Nobody reads snowcrash anymore?
It's like so 1992.
Nobody reads philosophical texts anymore?
It's like so 1931.
The map is NOT the territory.
No, this is not in general true. Not all measurable risk factors are fair game for variable insurance rates. For example, an insurance company that explicitly used race as a pricing factor would find itself in trouble, no matter how strong of a correlation it could demonstrate between race and cost of claims.
More generally, it is unfair for insurance to be priced according to factors that you have no control over, especially if it's possible for you to move into a higher-risk group involuntarily. The best example of this is the practice of charging higher health insurance rates to sick people than to healthy ones. This in fact decreases the value of the insurance to all policyholders, because you have no control over which of these two groups you will be in tomorrow. You pay the insurer low fees while you're healthy so they will cover you if the time comes when you are sick, but then when that time you can no longer afford the coverage!
So, to take it back to the thread topic: data mining for insurance factors is problematic because it can lead to insurance companies pricing coverage on the basis of all sorts of risk factors that, despite being real, they shouldn't use.
Are you adequate?
[i]"A little data is meaningless. A lot of data becomes information." [/i]
Agreed. Some years ago your name and address would mean nothing. Now there are people looking through trash just to find your name and address.
Years later from those only-name-and-address years, more information becomes more useful. First telephone numbers, then email, then social networking info*, then who knows what comes next.
The scary thing with the availability of our information out there is not what product advertisers can offer us. It isn't also just about privacy. There's a certain level of safety risk (financial, even physical) that you lose as more information about you is available.
The parent poster gave an example of cutting off some bad guy on the highway may result in threats on your family. Who knows, you may rise up high enough at work there's enough incentive for some bad guys to take advantage by blackmailing, kidnapping, etc.
I can control what info I give out, but my picture in the background, my name on some lists, info mentioning me people post somewhere-- I can't control those from being tagged, put into one giant clipboard of everything about me, ready to be used for good or evil.
Not a decade ago, data mining are done by big companies, advertisers, etc. Today, any Joe Schmoe with an internet connection (plenty), enough jobslessness (plenty), and enough grudge against you, can do harm so fast you won't even see it coming.
You don't even have kids do ya? Anyone who put a 6 year old kid on the phone with someone claiming to be a parent would not be working with children for long.
Don't be naive. This happens all the time. I know. I have a six year old.
No... in order to do that we have to make a law, and enforce it. That aint free. It's paid for by "the rest of us" and we don't give two shits about your preference to be un-data-mined. Go live in the freaking woods. Become a sailor.
Really? That must be why Facebook's ToS change isn't a controversy... and why Google latitude isn't being criticized... and why people freak out everytime they try and introduce a national id card. All the rest of you who don't give to shits?
One day you'll thank those of us who care for saving you from your own idiocy. I won't hold my breath though.