Over the past couple of years, the landscape of mobile technology has changed with the advent of smartphones and the app market. The power of apps came to the forefront with Apple’s iPhone and the App Store. These apps are now a key driver in the users experience with the smartphone. Most casual users purchase their smartphone on the strength of the app store that the smartphone is linked to and not the actual device.
Recently, smartphones have become capable of pinpointing a person’s location with a greater accuracy than before. Earlier GPS systems were able to provide locations within 100ft of the actual user. Coupling smartphone’s inbuilt connection to the mobile network and integrated maps, apps are now able to pinpoint a user’s location to within a meter of his actual location. Earlier, systems also had difficulties in distinguishing between signals coming from the same location, and were difficult to use for any practical application in large densely crowded cities.
These technology barriers have been sorted out to a large extent with the creation of tracking mechanisms of public Wi-Fi hotspots. This has allowed app developers to create services that use the user’s location to provide a service. Groupon, Google Latitude, Foursquare are services that allow users to “check-in” when they reach a place. These apps provide offers if they enter a mall, or notify if any of their friends are also in the same location.
The location sharing landscape shifted in 2010. That is once Apple included app multitasking to their mobile os, which in turn opened the doorway to "background" location sharing. For the very first time, iPhone apps could remain wide open consistently, monitoring and transmitting a customer's position. This granted programmers to make a wave of "social discovery tools" such as Skout, that hums along silently in the background and also informs owners when those with similar interests are close by.
Obviously, letting someone know where you are at any given moment of time via your mobile phone is a surefire way to open up a host of security issues. The dangers of such apps were brought to light when cases were reported and confirmed of 12-15 year old rape victims who were tracked using Skout. These girls were added as friends by strangers posing as teenagers and they exchanged several emails with them. Since Skout is a location sharing app, these strangers were able to track the location of these girls and used this information to molest them. This has led to Skout closing down its services to users under 18 years of age.
While 3 such cases of molesting have been reported, there are potentially many smaller instances where the location sharing features make life difficult. For instance, it would allow huge privacy issues. Another example of abuse of location sharing information is that it allows law enforcement agencies to keep tabs on any individual. The American Civil Liberties Union has accused the Department of Justice for misusing technology to keep track of individuals as per their whim. Currently no law exists that requires the police to request for a warrant before tracking a person’s location.
Like all new technology, location sharing has its risks and benefits. In the end, it would be up to the user to follow the same precautions online and in real life.
This is a guest post by Lance Goodman of dishtvoffer, a site that offers savings and current information on dish tv .
Recently, smartphones have become capable of pinpointing a person’s location with a greater accuracy than before. Earlier GPS systems were able to provide locations within 100ft of the actual user. Coupling smartphone’s inbuilt connection to the mobile network and integrated maps, apps are now able to pinpoint a user’s location to within a meter of his actual location. Earlier, systems also had difficulties in distinguishing between signals coming from the same location, and were difficult to use for any practical application in large densely crowded cities.
These technology barriers have been sorted out to a large extent with the creation of tracking mechanisms of public Wi-Fi hotspots. This has allowed app developers to create services that use the user’s location to provide a service. Groupon, Google Latitude, Foursquare are services that allow users to “check-in” when they reach a place. These apps provide offers if they enter a mall, or notify if any of their friends are also in the same location.
The location sharing landscape shifted in 2010. That is once Apple included app multitasking to their mobile os, which in turn opened the doorway to "background" location sharing. For the very first time, iPhone apps could remain wide open consistently, monitoring and transmitting a customer's position. This granted programmers to make a wave of "social discovery tools" such as Skout, that hums along silently in the background and also informs owners when those with similar interests are close by.
Obviously, letting someone know where you are at any given moment of time via your mobile phone is a surefire way to open up a host of security issues. The dangers of such apps were brought to light when cases were reported and confirmed of 12-15 year old rape victims who were tracked using Skout. These girls were added as friends by strangers posing as teenagers and they exchanged several emails with them. Since Skout is a location sharing app, these strangers were able to track the location of these girls and used this information to molest them. This has led to Skout closing down its services to users under 18 years of age.
While 3 such cases of molesting have been reported, there are potentially many smaller instances where the location sharing features make life difficult. For instance, it would allow huge privacy issues. Another example of abuse of location sharing information is that it allows law enforcement agencies to keep tabs on any individual. The American Civil Liberties Union has accused the Department of Justice for misusing technology to keep track of individuals as per their whim. Currently no law exists that requires the police to request for a warrant before tracking a person’s location.
Like all new technology, location sharing has its risks and benefits. In the end, it would be up to the user to follow the same precautions online and in real life.
This is a guest post by Lance Goodman of dishtvoffer, a site that offers savings and current information on dish tv .
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