Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Making the surveillance society fun

This makes the sixties paranoid in me want to start stockpiling canned peas and ammunition in my secret mountain hideout again.
Users of social network sites like Facebook will soon be sharing their exact whereabouts with their friends in real-time, owing to new technology that uses the mobile phone as a tracking device, experts say.

A new social network site, Gypsii, which launched this week at a phone industry trade show in Barcelona, allows users to search for and identify their contacts, be they in the neighbouring street or across the ocean.

[...]

"The real time location-based element of Gypsii adds a new dimension to the social networking phenomenon," said the founder and chief executive of the company, Dan Harple.

Anyone, at any time, gets to know the exact location and movements of everyone else in the network. This seems like the favorite dot net application for fearful parents, the government, pedophile stalkers, and those guys who run for the school board so they can tell kids to pull up their pants.

No thanks.

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