Machines Pensantes

You know those people who put tape over their laptop's webcam to keep digital peeping toms at bay? They're not crazy.

Via Gust MEES, Stéphane Koch

Say goodbye to privacy: In the future, advertisers, app makers, the government, and even our employers might be able to assess our personalities and react based on what we do with our phones.

 

Oliver Brdiczka, a manager at PARC, is working on contextual intelligence. The research, he hopes, will allow enterprises and the government to use data that is accumulated as we use our mobile phones. The data mined from our email messages, Facebook conversations, and sensors in the phone can be used for a variety of purposes, including intelligence, marketing and app design, even employee relations. In other words, owning a smart phone with this capability will be like having a spy ratting out your thoughts to the government.

 

For instance, PARC is working on a project that predicts a person's personality through their online behavior. The idea, Brdiczka said, is to market this data to enterprises, who want to know people's intent for targeted advertising or developing content customization. (...)

 

"Imagine a device that immediately lights up when you hold it in your hand and offers you the five most likely things you were going to do next: call your co-worker, drive to the meeting you're about to have, book a dinner or catch up on that article that you wanted to read," said Cue CEO Daniel Gross. "We'll be able to breathe life into our current phones, which currently only do things when we explicitly tell them every detail of what we want to do."

Via ddrrnt, P2P Foundation, olsen jay nelson