With Home, Facebook has crossed the line between something people check to become something that’s always on, checking in with us, fighting for attention, waving people we know in our face. Rather than a tool we use to talk to others, the phone, thanks to Facebook, has become something that communicates to us. And it’s Facebook that gets to do the talking.
We study fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and find that human mobility traces are highly unique. In fact, in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly, and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the carrier’s antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals.
These findings represent fundamental constraints to an individual’s privacy and have important implications for the design of frameworks and institutions dedicated to protect the privacy of individuals.
What kind of data is your cell phone company collecting? Malte Spitz wasn’t too worried when he asked his operator in Germany to share information stored about him. Multiple unanswered requests and a lawsuit later, Spitz received 35,830 lines of code — a detailed, nearly minute-by-minute account of half a year of his life.
Cookies are tracking our online behavior for advertising purposes, but a company specializing in retail analytics called Euclid, Inc. is moving that concept into real world shopping experiences.
Euclid uses open WiFi access points to track shopper behavior across stores: It does this by collecting the MAC address of smart phones as they passively connect to open networks while people shop, anonymizing the data, putting it into a giant database that then recognizes the device when it goes near any other Euclid customer’s network.
Anonymity came back into vogue. Today, there are literally dozens of anonymous sharing apps that allow you to vent, confess, or share secrets with strangers while going incognito. In an attempt to catalogue the emerging trend, I downloaded 25 different anonymous apps and tested each one. Here’s the complete, exhaustive rundown.
The average person with an Android smartphone is using it to search the web, from a browser, only 1.25 times per day, says Roi Carthy, head of special projects at Tel Aviv-based mobile startup Everything.Me. That isn’t just bad news for Google, it also signals a gigantic, fundamental shift in how people interact with the web.
Imagine a phone that delivers exactly what you need, right when you need it.
The EverythingMe launcher for Android. anticipates your needs, delivering the right apps, contacts and info every time you pick up your phone.
Mobile phones are impacting societies around the world. Here in the Philippines, text messaging is considered to be the most exploited service due to its affordability, convenience and immediacy. According to industry estimates, 2 billion text messages were sent everyday from the 60 percent of the population of 90 million who uses mobile phones. This has led to the popular notion of the Philippines as the “texting capital of the world”
Technology now lets you spy on your kids all the time. Why you shouldn’t.
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