Stalker Tech
from the come-out-come-out-wherever-you-are dept
It seems that “location-based” technologies are slowly growing in popularity. No one knows exactly what they’re going to be used for, but that doesn’t stop people from experimenting. Hewlett-Packard has donated a bunch of PDAs to the University of California at San Diego to see how students use a new buddy system that tells them where their buddy is. The system triangulates the user’s location by seeing how far it is away from various WiFi access points. There are, of course, a lot of privacy questions being asked around campus. While, officially, you can only see the locations of people who have agreed to let you see them, people are quite sure that hackers will soon work around that hurdle. I agree that it’s a little bit scary, but also see how it could be useful.
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When I am driving, I’d love to have one of those GPS map displays (with voice activation and text-to-speech, of course, for safety) to give me directions – I did it once with a laptop attached to a handheld GPS on the passenger seat and it was great. But I always thought the other cool thing would be to be able to locate the car of a friend on the map in real-time (as long as they let you view their location): this would be perfect when you are trying to follow someone to a location you don’t know, but you lose your friend in traffic.