2003-04-18 - Location Aware Computing
- I went to my first IEEE meeting, the speaker was John David Miller from Intel's Emerging Platforms Lab. The topic was Location Aware Computing. The first thing that struck me was the depth to which the issues appeared to have been thought through, and the honesty (at least from an engineering point of view) which which they were addressing privacy and security concerns. A couple of notes.
- Just as cell phones have created a new kind of tension between freinds and lovers (why weren't you answering your phone?), LAC will do this in a whole new way. "Honey, why couldn't I see where you were at lunch today?" ...
- His description of room level location awareness, and discussing the example of the Pentagon where they don't want you to have too much information as you walk around the building (except perhaps in case of an emergency if you need to find an exit), unless you have some sort of clearance. This all brought back memories of reading Neuromancer and hacking in a virtual world. All this information makes rendering a virtual shadow of the real world possible ... the hacking will begin at 4:20am.
Despite his genuine appearing concerns about user privacy and security concerns, I think that the inevitable maturation of this technology and personal and corporate greed will mean the the end of personal privacy as we know it. If nothing else the spam is gonna suck.
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