Location-based services could be combined with ad malware to facilitate targeting of demographic groups such as young females, creating a safety and privacy risk.
That's exactly what I fear. We know that predatory behavior already exists, and all it will take is one attack that's conclusively linked to LBS, and there'll be a hue and cry to regulate the whole process. A little sanity here could save LBS and also save lives.
I guess getting the Federal Goverment involved is one way of killing LBS. All that it will take is for one person to get hurt and the government will start to sworm around LBS and introducing LBS protection bills in order to have something to mention in their polictial ADs
Absolutely, and I don't know how we can do that when there's no advance notice of an LBS service and no realistic dialog on risks even when a service comes out. I'd like to see some guidelines on LBS applications agreed upon by the social networks, to forestall regulations that could hold up advances in LBS that could be helpful to all.
While I watching I thought, if a criminal really wants to commit a crime they are going to do it, but we shouldn't make their jobs easier. I don't think LBS is going to disappear, but we need to make sure that it is safe and protections are in place.
That's the problem in a nutshell, I think, Mary. We should be more proactive with respect to risk management. You can't take privacy that's ceded back even if you withdraw the original threat, and LBS is particularly insidious in that it can link you in the real world to your virtual persona.
Malware in ads is something the industry has known about for some time but they've been kind of keeping it below the radar. It's another issue we need to give more attention to, and so how it might combine with LBS is really scary!
Given McAfee's cautionary report on malware purveyors targeting unwary Internet searchers, it seems geo-location programs offer a fresh opportunity to isolate and target would-be victims. The frightening thing is that we'll have to wait a see what kinds of problem surface as these sites and services continue to grow.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
50 billion household devices will be on the Internet by 2020, according to Cisco. And we're hearing foreign governments are hacking our infrastructure. Surely our refrigerators are next!
YouTube's move to a partial pay-for-view model could help relieve a dearth of good new content but it could also complicate debates in many parts of the world over payment by content providers for delivery of their material to customers.
That's what Larry Page said on Google's earnings call, referring to the conjunction of mobile and the cloud. Well, let's chart it then! We need to be thinking about an Internet where 90% of our traffic goes to 70 destinations within 40 miles of us.
Facebook's Graph Search may face some profound challenges and risks, first, because Facebook users haven't been thinking of their posts as product reviews; and second, because Facebook will now have to contend with the social-network equivalent of SEO "gaming" of results.
EU operators are considering joining up to create a pan-European network to reduce competitive overbuild and cost. This might lower costs and focus operators on higher-level, more interesting services.
Google Maps 6.0 helps users navigate indoor locations like IKEA and airports. While this sounds good, Nicole fears it will also breed dumber humans who bump into each other a lot, or something.
In the final episode of this series about the death of Internet anonymity, Saunders describes how the Internet of the future will start to attain a level of intelligence that requires no human intervention. Scary.
What can users today do to protect their online privacy? The simplest and most obvious option is to not use the Internet – at all. However, once all digital information is consolidated over the Internet, trying to protect digital identity by simply unplugging from the Internet becomes impossible – a fact that has manifest implications for civil liberties, Saunders says.
By 2011 the number of Internet-connected sensors will exceed 1 trillion, making your chances of doing anything or going anywhere unnoticed pretty much zero. Saunders talks about how the 'sensortization' of the Internet is eliminating the traditional divide between online and offline populations.
The 20th Century Internet was characterized by the ability to interact with other people and information on the Internet largely without anyone knowing who you were. The Internet of this century, conversely, will be defined by identity. Saunders explains how Internet users are unwittingly contributing to the demise of the anonymous Internet.
Steve Saunders talks about the risks inherent in uncontrolled, widespread profiling of Internet users, and how one day this practice could form the basis of a new industry, the Outernet, which in economic terms will have outgrown the commercial value of the Internet itself.
Search companies and social networks are collecting incredibly detailed information about their users, says Steve Saunders, who predicts that these 'profiles' could one day become commodities to be bought and sold by companies on 'profile markets' or 'identity exchanges’ – the digital DNA equivalents of the financial and commodities exchanges on which stocks, oil, and gold are traded.
One of the most important Internet issues of all time is being ignored by the media. In this three-part video series Steve Saunders explains how search companies are turning the tables on their users by creating user profiles for financial gain, and how soon this trend will explode into full scale profiling.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE