On Sun, 16 Dec 2001, Nick May wrote:
> http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/phones/phones.jsp?id=23194900
I note that they say:
If you use a system in which GPS determines your location, you own the
information about your location, Crouch says. That means you can refuse
to release your exact coordinates, or only let particular kinds of
services see you.
Um, "yeah, right...not!" If the GPS unit is in your keitai, the phone
company knows where you are at all times, and, unless some government
regulation forces them to do otherwise, it's their information and
they're going to use it to their maximum financial advantage (whether
you like it or not).
> Imagine the spam though....
Yeah, exactly.
> And, thinking back to something that that mad march hare leap@gol.com
> posted a while ago, nice to be able to pin a message with an id on it that
> others could search for - a "group trust" based posting system so that you
> could see if others of a trusted group had a comment about that
> location... "here, food be good, etc etc...."
This is not so hard to solve, actually. You have to authenticate the
poster of the comment, but once that's done, other users can rate the
comments, and those accounts that generate a lot of bogus comments will
be rated down, whereas those who generate good comments will be rated up.
This is in use on many web sites at this point (e-bay, slashdot...).
Of course, until the new GPS systems with 3-meter resolution come in,
this is not going to be terribly useful to me in the middle of Shibuya,
where the best case resolution--a sphere 10m in radius centered around
me--can easily touch a dozen or more bars, restaurants, shops, etc.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
Received on Mon Dec 17 10:13:49 2001