location aware services

Location based services have taken over the cellular market in the last several years and now Apple has decided that your location information may be worth a bunch of cash. Apple changed their company license today to state that they now store â€œthe real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or deviceâ€ and that they have the right to share it with â€œpartners and licensees.â€

Apple is working to calm customer fears, claiming that all location based data is “collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you.” It’s a statement that should seem familiar to Facebook users who were told the same thing months ago, only to find out that their profile information and the profile information of their friends were being shared with advertisers.

Unlike Facebook, there is apparently no way to opt-out of the Apple policy. Actually that’s not totally true, you can refuse to ever download another app for the life of your device and then stay away from the iTunes store, at which point you aren’t forced to agree to the companies new terms of service before proceeding with purchases. [Read more…]

Originally posted on June 22, 2010 @ 5:39 pm

A new site called Please Rob Me is getting some media mileage not only because of its intriguing name but also because of its equally intriguing purpose. Â Please Rob Me describes its goal as follows:

The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc. Because all this site is, is a dressed up Twitter search page (link). Everybody can get this information.

So, what does the site actually does? Well, controversial as well. It compiles and lists down all the status updates published on FourSquare and perhaps soon other location-aware services as well, that pertains to individuals saying that they are about to leave their homes to go somewhere else. These are posted on the site and on Twitter.

While Please Rob Me’s goal is unquestionably noble, the way it is pushing things to achieve this goal is not. Raising the level of awareness of the public over some dangerous matters is a good feat, but actually giving the would-be perpetrators an idea about this whole thing is certainly not commendable.

The site posts those updates on their Twitter account for all its followers to see and monitor. Â They say that FourSquare, Gowalla and the others are just dressed up Twitter where updates live links that anyone can click through and access.

But the thing is, those location-aware service still give users the options to set up their privacy settings and control who among their contacts they would allow access to their updates. So, I guess location-aware services are still safe, just like Twitter.

Originally posted on February 17, 2010 @ 5:44 pm