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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