They Know Where You Are... and What You Want
They know where you are and what you want... - RF CafeThe December 2012 edition of Scientific American has a short article discussing how much information not just Big Bro but also the Internet search engines has on you - both from a historical perspective and in real time. In the former case the purpose is for surveillance and exploitation for a blackmail motive if the need arises, and in the later case for exploitation with a profit motive since the need always arises. Your cellphone is a godsend to such amassers of personal data. As reported, services like PlaceIQ* and Skyhook† know that you are most likely to click on a smartphone advertisement if, based on your phone's location data, they discover you are sitting in a movie theater before the film starts rolling, if you are at home on a Sunday morning, or if you are in the middle of a lake fishing. That is when the ad services charge companies the highest fees for serving a clickable promo to your phone. With enough data, they can deduce your personal identity. Maybe that can be used to set up an ambush by a hacker who gets access to it. Nice, eh? You are soooo... predictable!

* Per their website, "PlaceIQ extracts context and meaning from location data and organizes this into actionable intelligence about a hyper local location."

† - “There's no part of society that's not going to use these data,” says Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook

Posted  2012