UK Guardian: How I stalked my girlfriend
British technologoy writer Ben Goldacre writes about how he stalked his girlfriend.
He got her consent (in principle; he didn’t describe exactly what he’d do), paid a trivial amount of money to a third-party website to put a trace on her mobile phone, then deleted the warning notifications that the service texted to her phone.
Total elapsed time: about five minutes, no hacking required.
Upshot: a map of her whereabouts for an entire day.
The privacy implications should be quite obvious.
February 3rd, 2006 at 9:39 am
If Missus Monica and I decide to breed I think I’ll buy our kid(s) a cell phone the moment they learn to walk…
February 3rd, 2006 at 9:44 am
Heh. LoJack your offspring! They’re even making cell phones designed for kids.
Kids, especially young kids, don’t have reasonable expectation of privacy (not to mention a whole host of other rights), so that might be okay, and I can certainly see the value of knowing where your kids are when you’re not there. But at the same time, just as our society is being changed by kids like me who grew up with computers and could touch-type at 15, I wonder what it’ll look like when kids grow up thinking it’s perfectly normal to be under 24/7 surveillance.
Probably we’ll adapt, and I’m just being stodgy.
February 3rd, 2006 at 11:24 am
To heck with cell phones:
http://www.forgetmenotpanties.com/
I’d forgotten about these until today. Of course the whole thing was a hoax, but it’s a possible technology…