Adaptive Path Blog

Two weeks ago, I was called for jury duty. I went to the courthouse, opening my laptop in the jurors’ waiting room to take advantage of the courthouse’s wifi while waiting to be summoned. Since I’m a Plazes user, I checked to make sure the courthouse’s wireless was registered in the service. As it turns out, it had been, just a month before, by Thor Mueller, Adaptive Path’s upstairs neighbor. Which meant that I now know Thor had jury duty a month ago.

What a strange world we live in.

I also realized how often in the last few months my whereabouts have not only been on Plazes, but also my blog, and, geotagged on Flickr. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that it won’t be long (if it isn’t already in the works) for someone to create a tracker to find people’s whereabouts in time and space at any given moment. You can imagine going to Google, typing in a name, and getting a timeline- and map-view of their life. Granted, you’d need a lot of online data to make this possible, and I generate a lot of online data. But it probably won’t be long before everyone is generating a lot of this data, mostly because of their mobile devices. And there are some scary privacy implications for this indeed.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 28th, 2006 at 8:33 am and is filed under Interaction Design, The Big Picture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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