After Reading This You'll Throw Your SmartPhone In the Toilet!
I know you know Technology will take over our lives more and more. But I didnt realize we are at a point now, I mean NOW, where it tracks your every move! Check this Business Week snippet I grabbed and tell me your not thinking of throwing your fancy iPhone or BlackBerry in the nearest toilet:
"INCREDIBLY RICH INFORMATION"
Every time a user clicks on an application, whether it's to turn a phone into a radio or make a bid on eBay, the time and place of the event zips straight to the company selling the service. Certain phone manufacturers can also peek at this data, depending on the handset. Naturally, the wireless service provider also sees it and can place it into the context of the user's other behavior, from physical movements to calling patterns. While phone companies have long had a line on customer behavior, the applications add crucial perspective by pointing directly to each person's interests and needs. (Barflies, Sense researchers found, spend more time than others playing an alcohol-themed game on their handsets.) "All of a sudden we have this incredibly rich information on how and where people use their mobile applications," says Ted Morgan, chief executive of Skyhook Wireless, a provider of tracking technology.
It's also becoming easier to pick up a handset's digital trail. Traditionally, wireless carriers have marked our wanderings only by the nearby cell towers receiving our signals. Each phone, even at rest, stays in touch with those towers so it can send and receive calls. But the towers can miss a person's location by several hundred yards. Satellites are more precise, but they often don't work when people are under roofs. Many of the latest phones, including the iPhone, have Wi-Fi, the radio signals used in home networks. These signals often can pinpoint someone within 33 feet.
On a stroll through a mall, a phone beams its presence to dozens of Wi-Fi networks in stores. Skyhook, which locates millions of wandering customers for companies offering mobile services, has tied together 100 million Wi-Fi access points around the globe. It'll have plenty of machines to track: Some 56 million Wi-Fi-equipped handsets were shipped in 2008, according to the Wi-Fi Alliance. Even with a slow economy, that figure is expected to balloon to more than 200 million this year, with Nokia alone producing four-fifths of the handsets. The upshot? Increasingly, even phones that look run-of-the-mill will trace users' movements with greater accuracy.
