 The
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 |
