[Sigia-l] IA/interaction of Location (was dream career advice )

[Listera]

"David Heller" wrote:

> did apple buy iChat the company?)

Nope, it's their software from about a year ago, that works on AIM and .mac.

> Before people start screaming "privacy violation" they have all kinds of
> privacy management tools, but have found that the audience Yound Adults and
> Teens does seem to use them, and when asked the reason was not that they
> couldn't figure out how to use them, but that they didn't care. Now for a more
> generic tool like iChat I would mind if it gave my GPS position, but I
> wouldn't mind if it gave my metro area or even neighborhood information, or
> information that I put in the preferences on each desktop and device I use w/
> the iChat service for a given handle.

Well, there are pros and cons of location identification, especially by
default. Technically, it's fairly trivial. Even if you don't have GPS, iChat
knows your phone number and your ISP knows a lot about you, and you can
discover a lot from those. There are various federal-level legislation
floating around regarding GPS location identification schemes (especially
after 9/11), and hopefully whatever happens our fate won't determined by the
usage patterns of Japanese teenagers :-)


Ziya
Nullius in Verba