Everything the Internet Knows About Me (Because I Asked It To) | Hacker News Reader

Everything the Internet Knows About Me (Because I Asked It To)

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86 pointsdannyv12 comments

If you are interested in life tracking, you might want to try out one of our (Whereoscope, YC10) apps called DriveTime.

Passively monitors your location every 10 minutes, collates, and then lets you view graphs etc. from within the app. Information is not shared with anyone - it's designed purely for an individual user.

I realize this is a self-serving post, but thought it might be relevant. The app just got dropped to $0.99.

Any chance this will show up in the Android marketplace? Seems like it'd be pretty neat to see that kind of data.

It may come back to hunt the author down the road. I am not sure why anyone would expose themselves like that in public. Reminds me a story of lifelock service. CEO of lifelock exposed his SSN number to the public only to find it used for fraudulent activities.

This data about all of us, what we are doing, where we go, who we date, what cars we drive, etc is going to become publicly available eventually. There are going to be tons of companies who really want that data.

If we don't make a system where that data can be bought and sold based on the preferences of the person being data mined, then privacy will be blown out the window in just 30 years. There will be no reason to introduce yourself to people, all they have to do is access your logs.

Unless you host-proof the data. I'm working on a host proof location-tracking application right now. The app records my location, encrypts it, and sends it to a webservice. The only unencrypted field is the timestamp.

Then, when I want to query the data, a client-side Javascript app can display it on a timeline on a map. You plug your encryption key into this client-side app.

It would also be cool to create a host-proof method for indexing the location itself, so I could ask the service for all of the logs within a certain radius of a location. Not sure how to do this securely yet, though.

"Host-proof"? Where does the Javascript come from? (Yes, you can write a plugin, or make your user analyze the Javascript with Ethereal every time they log in.)

Of course in David Brin's novel Earth (published in 1990 believe it or not), he shows a world we seem to rapidly be approaching - where privacy and secrecy are considered to be somewhat evil. Looking at the growth of Facebook and other sites where stuff that 20 years ago no one would want you to know about them is now considered great material for your "Wall", I have to wonder if the solution to the privacy problem will turn out to be no one caring? If you look at it, a lot of the privacy issue comes down to asynchronous knowledge - i.e. what you know about me that I don't know about you. If we make sure we can know virtually everything about everyone, is privacy still a problem?

Then again, does anybody really have any privacy these days, compared with 50 years ago?

All it takes is one person who knows what they're doing to find out a -LOT- about you.

Then again, did people really have privacy when living in small villages in the countryside where everybody knew each other? I think the rise of privacy came with the development of big urban areas...

There is an old Albanian movie called 14 vjeç dhëndër (14 years old groom) which shows also the privacy keeping problems they had in small villages.

There are some secrets that everyone, even in a family, keeps. People can't know if you don't tell them, but with the advent of the computerized era, information escapes even if you don't tell it.

Information can only escape if you let it escape.

I strongly disagree. There is information about you that you can't control: such as friends that share photos of you; NSA, CIA, etc, data about you; government records; etc.

The one I am concerned is not my friend sharing a photo, is the data corporations and governments capture about me (with or without me knowing about). It was said here also, if you can make an infringement of the law, never know about it, and be held guilty by data you didn't even know to exist (the example being the import of foreign cheese in the US, even for personal use).

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