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Forming New Mobile Networks With People-Borne Sensors
An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from Medical Daily: "Members of the public could form the backbone of powerful new mobile internet networks by carrying wearable sensors. According to researchers from Queen's University Belfast, the novel sensors could create new ultra high bandwidth mobile internet infrastructures and reduce the density of mobile phone base stations. The engineers from Queen's renowned Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT), are working on a new project based on the rapidly developing science of body centric communications."
There are too many privacy concerns, especially identity theft, that would make such a technology unacceptable to the general public, much less the governing bodies that would need to approve the devices. It's one thing to connect two devices explicitly via special applications. It's a completely different thing to have devices talk to each other, even if only for relay purposes, without the owners' knowledge.
Why should "Members of the public.." have to shoulder the burden? What about those lazy, unproductive chickens, rabbits, rats, seagulls. At least it will give them something else to do rather than stealing my lunch.
All I can imagine are situations similar to setting an open access point to redirect everything to meatspin as a prank...or possibly something slightly more malicious
It's going to have some technological hurdles to cross, like transatlantic links...unless you like rowing...