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Your Personal Data Is On Your Phone -- In the Form of Bacteria
jfruh (300774) writes "Yes, we all know that we have a lot of personally identifying information on our phones that maybe we shouldn't. But even if our data is locked down and encrypted, we're all leaving biological footprints on our phones, which are basically extensions of our personal bacterial ecosystem. A study has concluded that phones could be a less invasive source of information in studying individual microbiomes than current techniques."
I don't want to be tracked: I don't want my personal data stored and dissected in Google's servers, I don't want my fingerprints filed in some government agency's database, I don't want my DNA sequenced and recorded anywhere, and I don't want my microbiome analyzed.
I don't want to, but I have no choice apparently. Anonymity is going the way of the dodos. Fuck I hate this world...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
you insensitive clod!
This is exactly why the security-conscious always wipe their phones clean
If the app requires permission to access my micro biological data, I refuse to install it.
So basically what researchers are saying is that the trail a person leaves on the Internet, and the phone networks, is not much different from our body odour, which also stems more or less from bacteria. This is a rather fascinating if not a bizarre analogy. If so then we can only hope our trails drive of competitors and attracts the opposite sex. Somebody please pass me the soap.
I do wonder what Napoleon would have made of it. Would he have told his women before returning from battles not only not to wash, but also not to clear their browsing history?!? ...
You may find this interesting: SciFri: Making Art From the DNA You Leave Behind.
Don't worry about title mentioning about Art, it's very little to do about art what they talk about, it's about study of privacy, security and possible consequences, a solution she developed etc.
Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s “Stranger Visions” project started with a question: What could she learn about a person by collecting one of their stray hairs? In an age of ever-cheaper DNA sequencing, the answer turned out to be “a lot.” Dewey-Hagborg’s portraits of strangers, made with DNA samples found in public places, called attention to the feasibility of DNA snooping. Now with her latest project, “Invisible,” she wants to put the tools to protect genetic privacy in consumers’ hands. But is total genetic privacy really possible?
You can get the pink eye I caught from my kids for free.
The movie Gattaca had a lot of the plot based on DNA.
From the Wikipedia article: ... ...
The film's title is based on the first letters of guanine, adenine, thymine, and cytosine, the four nucleobases of DNA.
Was Gattaca a preview of a real future where our DNA controls where we live/work etc...
http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/p4t1a2/vibrant-constipation-pill
I am sure those phones will have a lot more bacteria than otherwise.
When humanity was rural and communities small, everybody had their nose up everyone else's ass. Ask anyone who has lived in a small town. When cities got bigger, those in charge could usually find out about and grab anyone they were interested in for a varying amount, depending on the trackee's intelligence and the government's (lack of) organization. Nowadays, it's a little bit easier IF someone has an interest in finding you (it doesn't cost as much as, say, 50 years ago) but even before computers, if THEY wanted to find you, you were found (Exhibit A: Eichmann; Exhibit B: Mengele). The ability to find people has always been constrained by available money, and by nothing else. So, please stop deluding yourselves about your own importance... the government has always known, and unless you represent a substantial monetary loss, it doesn't care.
The sheer amount of data they have to collect provides a kind of fish-school protection effect because thy don't have the budget to hire analysts to interpret it all. Remember that the commies knew way, way more than modern Western states ever have known, and even they couldn't interpret the data well enough, fast enough. If you want to blow whistles or otherwise attract the attention of The Big Bad Overseers, make it expensive for them to go after you (fake identity, bolthole somewhere disorganized [no, not Russia FFS], and your track will be abandoned (not lost) because, like everyone else, they are "overworked and underpaid". To use a metaphor, what good is having every aircraft on your radar when there is only one radar screen and only one controller on duty? A lot of things will escape that controller's attention and metal's gonna get bent.