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Company Designs "Big Brother Chip"
Taco Cowboy writes "Here comes a chip that can pinpoint you in-door and out, it can even tell others on which floor of a building you are located. It's the Broadcom 4752 chip. It takes signals from global navigation satellites, cell phone towers, and Wi-Fi hot spots, coupled with input from gyroscopes, accelerometers, step counters, and altimeters The company calls abilities like this 'ubiquitous navigation,' and the idea is that it will enable a new kind of e-commerce predicated on the fact that shopkeepers will know the moment you walk by their front door, or when you are looking at a particular product, and can offer you coupons at that instant."
When you say "coupons" I hear "pushy advertisements."
I have the hiccups.
Time for tinfoil overalls.
At least it will be a shiny future.
you have the chip on you - otherwise, piss off
The "one-stop-shopping" nature of the chip is chilling. Consider, Broadcom has seen enough of a market to warrant developing a sophisticated device, the stated purpose of which is to determine it's position and "phone home" with that information. Worse yet, it will also phone in all the personal details about you that it has access to, so that those "coupons" can be quickly crafted. If that's not scary enough, consider that also available to any given "shop keeper", is a list of all the other shops you've visited, and when. Still not bugged enough? Think about this technology in the hands of entities far more dangerous than merchants; law enforcement, for example.
Japanese mobile phones have had this for a while. Personal navigation apps that can guide you through underground stations and inside buildings using wifi and accelerometers when GPS is unavailable.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Growing up in the 80s, living through the boom times of the 90s, and looking back today. What I used to think was was a path to freedom and salvation of the intellectual variety, I now see as our oppression. Slavery of a new type. Step by step we are sealing our own doom while at the same time handing over the keys to a new elite. The social consolidation is giving rise to the new aristocrats.
I really hope I'm wrong.
Life is not for the lazy.
wet a towel and wrap it round your head.
then get your ass to Mars.
My wife accidentally ran my new passport with its RFID tag through the washing machine. I still get through customs. The existence of the chips does not make them infallible.
Gently reply
This is an improved GPS chip, allowing a phone to pinpoint its location even when GPS is spotty.
Shopkeepers won't get the data, even if the phone companies would be allowed to sell location data cause there is no ROI: not enough people will have such a chip to even make it worthwhile. Neither do they need data that detailed. As some other poster already wrote: they'd rather know how much money the customer has, not where he is right now. Both, the have not and the billionaire can watch the same Mercedes 600SL or Smart car with their phone in their pocket. Doesn't tell the shopowner who can actually afford the luxury car.
What can happen is that the government subpoenas the telco location data for a subscribe just like they do now and that the better accuracy helps them to pinpoint the location of the subscribe better. This can be used for "OMG evil gubmint!" or it can be used, probably a lot less of course, for finding a missing person e.g. inside an avalanche.
Of course without deliberately wrong sensationalism like this, the pagehits aren't coming.
They're saying it would be great for merchants to know where you are but I'd actually have to carry it and keep it charged for it to work. So it has to offer me a benefit and instant coupons or getting bombarded by ads isn't a good selling point.
A better application for this would be urban GPS. A big problem with current GPS is that it doesn't work in dense urban cities. Try to use GPS in New York... it's almost useless. First off, you're underground half the time. Second, even when you're above ground you tend to be amongst big buildings that obscure the sky. However, I get great cellphone reception pretty much anywhere in New York and wifi hotspots are pretty ubiquitous even if they're mostly locked. If your mobile navigation could make use of other static radio signals for navigation then GPS would work deep within the urban jungle. And THAT is valuable.
The pitch of "oh merchants can predict your location" is asinine. if you wanted to sell the tracking feature then I suppose this would work for tracking boxes. After all, existing tracking technology that relies on GPS won't work in warehouses, underground, or even inside of industrial shipping containers. But something that could triangulate cell towers should work just about damn near anywhere there is "civilization"...
All and all, a neat little chip and I wish it well. Whoever is coming up with the applications for it needs to be smacked around a little with a frozen trout.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy walking down the street. I have it in my home, or another person's home if I trust that person. Expecting that stores and service providers will give me this same courtesy is foolishness. It also seems that if I turn off my cell phone and laptop, I'll be invisible to this magic chip as well. Only the shadow knows.
OK, so I've got a device in my pocket - a cellphone, call it a tablet, whatever - and as I walk through the mall it vibrates with special offers from each retailer I pass in front of - how long do I leave this "feature" enabled? Two, three stores? The fact that the device is "smart" and will deduce from my facebook status of "single" and that I'm male that I'm not interested in offers from Yankee Candle, Bed, Bath and Beyond or Victoria's Secret doesn't really help much...
It will be the most disabled "feature" on personal devices, and will sink any product where the device is subsidised by the alerts.
I see a great market in the "I've fallen and I can't get up" device market - concerned children will buy them for their elderly parents who are still living independently, and let's not forget the "where's my kid" market segment, but this location-based direct marketing is a dumb idea. period.
Ken
Your 6150 can't provide the FCC-mandated support for 911 geolocation so any US carrier detecting it in their network will ban its IMEI to avoid being fined by the FCC.
Funny how they "can't" ban stolen phones to protect their customers but they can do it to protect their own pocketbook...
So... THAT explains why folks are always depicted wearing shiny jumpsuits in those old sci-fi shows!!! Downright prophetic.
The Digital Sorceress
As I posted only weeks ago, this means that even if you turn off your phone, or the GPS tracking, or even walk under a radio shield of some kind, the phone will extrapolate where you are based on your last verified map-pin by using solid state gyroscope, clock, and 3-axis accelerometer. The only need for radio will be to correct inevitable errors.
Turning off the bloody phone, or "turning off the GPS", or putting it in a steel box, or perhaps even removing the user-accessible battery (there'll be a backup, guaranteed) won't stop it from tracking you. Sales my tired soul, this is DHS tracking.
Wrong! It takes several minutes for super computers to do the super advanced triangulation math and sound affects associated with it. And if they hang up before the calculations are done the data is lost forever!
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