When you use your smartphone to take a photo or use social media platforms like Twitter, the messages you send are frequently encoded with your GPS coordiantes. Yiannis Kakavas, a programmer in Germany, has created a program called Creepy that aggregates all the data you send you out, and lets anyone build a map showing where you were when you Tweeted, Flickr’d, or Foursquared. Bob talks to Kakavas about his aptly named program.
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Comments [6]
For those looking for a link: http://ilektrojohn.github.com/creepy/
Link, please?
One aspect of this story that was missed is the simplicity of faking the GPS data; especially for web-based services like Twitter and Foursquare. The more emphasis placed on the significance of this information, the greater the risk of abuse; it would be very easy to provide a Twitter-based alibi.
Could you provide a link to creepy?
Holy cow! You mind if I retweet this to everybody as soon as I can?
Are we really that afraid of everything? Is everyone really out to get us?
I think that this attitude of anonymity and suspicion just leads to more and more disconnection from the community around us. The mask of anonymity that one wears to hide from those that would try to do them harm allows people to behave in ways they wouldn't IRL - in real life.
Not long ago there where whole books dropped at every American's doorstep that listed the names, phone numbers and addresses of their neighbors. Those days didn't seem so dangerous.
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