NYTimes on Privacy: “These phones can find you“
Do you want to broadcast your location?
ITWeek talks about FireEagle from Yahoo (still in alpha)
Ticket fought with GPS evidence.
Meanwhile, GPS chips on cell phones ramping up, via EETimes on a heated up market according to manufactures.
And TruePosition study discovers what users want from LBS.
As you probably already know, cell phones are always communicating through radio signals with the cell towers in range so by triangulating someone’s signals you could find out its current location.
If you don’t believe it yet, check out this site that a friend pointed out recently. But no need to freak out just yet…
This has nothing to do with GPS per se, but with tracking and privacy issues. A research group from the University of Washington figured out a way to obtain data transmitted by the iPod + Nike Sport Kit.
The group developed hardware and software capable of tracking a person using the kit and points out the risks involved with open broadcast of RFID-type signals. Encryption required as always but not used in this version of the product. Apple and Nike must listen to this and act.
First seen on MacDailyNews.
Want to pay for something with you phone? Nokia is field testing its MasterCard based-service in Dallas.
Next step? You will start getting those location-based ad’s on your cell. Welcome Little Brothers!
Meanwhile NYTimes is talking EXIF and Geotagging.
Slashdot brought up Jelbert Geotagger, a piece of hardware that will get your current location into your photos. Privacy concerns fills the thread. Certainly more expensive than a cheap dedicated GPS unit, a digital camera and some software.
Great, fantastic article “Meet the Cell-Phone Tracking Parents” at Sci-Today.com. Like this pearl:
“I have a problem with any kind of tracking device, especially for kids,” she says, “because they will grow up with the expectation that tracking your every move is a normal part of life. It raises the hair on my neck because we’re training kids to be tracked at all times and they will think that some authority tracking them is fine.”
And by her, the article refers to “Katherine Albrecht, coauthor of Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID”.
Repeat after me: “Senior Citizens”, “Senior Citizens”, …
Like the cabbies from New York, Philly drivers are pretty unhappy with Philadelphia Parking Authority after being required to add GPS units to their taxi cabs.
Meanwhile, you can now buy the Micro Track devices at Sharper Image. And more tracking devices are becoming available. Plus, phone companies continue to add tracking services to their customers. Like Disney’s Family Locator, powered with AutoDesk backend location services.
And now you can feel safer walking to the dorm at night.
Go ahead, track away…
Loki reminds me of a character in a book I read sometime ago from Gore Vidal: Kalki, with an Indian God/Goddess image in my mind but Wikipedia points North, to a Nordic myth to be more specific whose character in fact tells quite a bit about this package.
Lost?
But before we get there it seems that the big press is finding out about the gps/location phenomena and jumps in. Business Week has “Hello, where am I?” selling Verizon for its navigation phones. Better than tracking services, a special service from your wireless phone cable company.
And Evangelics also take you for a walk, with GPS. Nice.
Loki
SkyHook Wireless made some noise about Loki a while ago. I decided to try it out at last. For now, Windows Firefox only (versions for Mac & Linux in the works it seems). It updates your Firefox browser and installs itself as a new toolbar atop your tabs.
Like Wigle, Loki keeps a database with the known location of Wireless Access Points for a given area (check their coverage map), as a fallback your machine IP address can be used with a much lower accuracy which might take you to the building of your ISP instead.
From the Developers page: “By capturing the MAC address and SSID of nearby WiFi access points, the Skyhook WiFi Positioning System (WPS) can then triangulate the device’s location and generate a latitude/longitude - or we can go a step further and reverse geocode that location to return street address, city, county, zip, country, etc”.
There is also available a Skype plug-in for E911. The idea is that you can make emergency calls and provide your current location.
Find me
SkyHOOK Wireless installs a driver to XP and from Firefox (or IE) it calls into it to determine your location, probably by talking back to its location server with your IP address and the MAC ID of your Wireless AP. The bottom left of the status bar in the browser has now a lat/lon setting.
The idea is that if your wireless access point can be found at their database, it will be used to pinpoint your current location, otherwise you will need to “tune” it manually by telling Loki where you are (even if you are trying to find that out) by providing an address (# street, city, zip). This will make a HTTPS call back to Loki servers to upload your data. After that it should tell you about what is around with the Channels tab.
It does jump to quite a few different websites including Yahoo pages that are far from being any useful and some other places. But you will need to work a bit to find something if only Zip code was used for positioning. Navizon seems to have a better model by allowing users to upload their own access point location data.
Goodies
The GeoTag tab will give you the corresponding XML tag for the current location:
Geotag 37.059830 -122.003914 Location provided by Skyhook Wireless
The toolbar provides an interface to Google Local by letting you use keywords to search locally. If you want to add a tagline to your email with your current location info, the Email tag will do just that by opening up whatever email client you have with a template for your info and a plug to Loki itself.
Uninstall? Not really
The Options tab will let you edit the list of Channels including the way the URL is built and passed to the corresponding website. From here you can also uninstall Loki from your browser. But beware that this won’t remove the service that gets installed with it. You will need to uninstall and remove it manually [check under Services and for C:\Program Files\Skyhook Wireless\Wi-Fi Driver\WPSScannerSvc.exe”].
And you will also need to uninstall their Wi-Fi driver from Add/Remove Programs. Check all the data that is compiled at
C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Skyhook Wireless\log.
Conclusion
Based on the comment from Jed tuning adds your access point to Loki’s database and Yahoo isn’t the only place you can get stuff from. To be honest I got a bit discouraged to try more channels after the initial results. And I don’t like the fact that you still have a service and driver running even after you have it apparently uninstalled from a machine, plus all the data that is being monitored and stored. A bit too much.
But in any case, giving it a bit more use I looked up for gas prices and it did point to stations close by. Weather, which uses the Zip code worked too. But ShopLocal put me 10 miles from Oakland when I was in fact about 80 miles away.
Guess I had to take into account that this is still a beta product and that a non-GPS based location technique on the client side would inherently produce a lower precision result. Loki gives a neat interface for your browser, but for their open (or semi-open) nature Wigle and Navizon might in the long run give you better data and possibilities. Point taken.
Loki is also working on a buddy finder for mobile phone users.
Update: Notice that these guys got a pretty good chunk of money, I wonder where it is coming from.
A new UI?
And for some mobile interface, check MobileMagazine for an UI that might have some future potential. What you thing?
I’m not even going to talk about all of the teen, kid & whatever else tracking news that popped up in my screen in the last couple of weeks. My point about this whole issue is: keep track of those who actually need tracking. Seniors, older people that get lost and can’t find their way home. Look at examples in Japan and Ohio. Trust your kid, be with them. Here another, similar opinion on the issue.
Workers are also being included in the current tracking list, like this article shows about New York workers. There is a lot at stake here. Be aware. Don’t let the atmosphere of fear scare you. Remember your freedom, keep it, close. Otherwise, just call it by its name: this is called trespassing, like we learn how not to do in our prayers and the Bible.
I might be a bit paranoid when seeing these things, but as a Brazilian that grew up during its worst dictatorship times (btw, didn’t you had anything with that?), it is quite easy for me to notice some of the signs I kept of one. It always ended with “National Security” being used everytime someone in the government wanted to close an argument.
Cycles, right?
I have to say something about this phone. It is amazing the amount of controversy I can get by just mentioning it. Nokia changes its models so much, that one of them, had the numbers in a different order. That really pissed off a lot[a] people.
The 3660 does look kinda cool, but the more you use the more you start to wonder. It does feel a bit heavy, and too plastic and not that solid. No zoom in the camera, and a funny keyboard. It is definitively its own style. The joystick thingy is quite too small, and it should have some sort of friction, like rubber, in it.
I like it for the fact that I can upload a .SIS package through infrared, install it from its inbox and be happy. That makes my life a lot simpler (except for two steps, two files, too long a process like with Wayfinder).
The fact that I don’t have a GPS receiver does count, but for now I’m wondering about GSM tracking and the pletora of freeware available for one to play with. Check the snapshots for the kind of data you get to see on them.
There is good instructional material at this website from a package called “GSM Position Locator”, a commercial package for sale at Handago.
MCC translates to (Mobile Country Code); MNC stands for Mobile Network Code which according to the GPL page above “identifies GSM network within country”. You will also see references to LAI as the Location Area ID, and CID or Cell ID. More about this here.
But back to the 3660’s, I wonder how Cingular implemented E911 on these phones. It might be software running in the phone itself that could perform the triangulation necessary to provide its position. Symbian API might say something about it. GSM is an European protocol, signal, frequency all of that. GPRS supported by this and other models from Nokia is way cool. Internet Radio, why any other way? An independent technology that came before GSM itself.
And you have a whole OS: Symbian, to play with. Kind clunky sometimes, takes a bit too long to start-up, but after a while you begin to see some usability conquests. Anyhow. If not, just for kicks, and some ideas out-of-the-box.