posted April 27, 2010 11:32 AM         

I am a paranoid but it is "manageable" I do not at present need counseling.
However, if I do start putting a lock on the tapioca pudding and the coffee, buy every copy of Catcher in the Rye I come in personal contact with I'll revise.
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Barbara Hernandez RSS Feed
Apr 24th 2010 at 9:00AM

retailers can find you by your phone

quote:

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Would you be OK with retailers knowing your exact location? Best Buy and Macy's will start using an application that will allow them to know when people are nearby and offer rewards in hopes of luring them inside to make a purchase. This kind of fishing for customers is courtesy of Shopkick, a Palo Alto, Calif. start up that swaps information when shoppers check out store bar codes or price tags, according to the Wall Street Journal.

With the Shopkick app, the retailer will know who individual shoppers are and can communicate "when you need it, and how you want it," says Rick Rommel, Best Buy's senior vice president of new business. With the proliferation of smartphones, "there is a tidal wave here that we need to be a part of," he says.

By summer, Shopkick will begin exploiting Internet-equipped smart phones and their location-sensing abilities by using it to provide information to retailers. If customers use their iPhone or Android handsets, which are equipped with tiny cameras to read barcodes so customers can comparison shop in-store, that store also has access to that person's information -- it's only fair, after all. If your smartphone comes equipped with the latest in geolocation apps then the store will also be able to know where your smartphone (and you) are.

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posted April 27, 2010 12:16 PM         

Sure it must be fun/handy to have a portable comp...yeah yeah yeah.
Do I have one? Yes and it is a pay as you go.
I thought that would be the end of it but WRONG! I get text messages from Verizon daily at 10 AM trying to sell me something. Sometimes I get two messages which makes me feel very warm and fuzzy. The min. expire after 30 days so I do not refill it unless I have an "emergency"

I will stop there as I know I am very much in the minority with this bias.

But I will also share this, I worry that my integrated webcam can be turned on remotely. turns out this is not so crazy as this was actually done to some school kids.
http://technorati.com/lifestyle/article/big-brother-watching-school-kids/

posted April 27, 2010 07:33 PM         

Getting depressed with this whole Social Media thing

Written by: Steven Hodson on April 23, 2010

This whole Social Media game is becoming increasingly very depressing. I’ve really tried to get past this but instead the feeling only becomes more ingrained. I have tried to slough it off as just a passing phase as a result of too many big old hot air balloons to poke holes in; but it is more than that I think.

After all when you hear a bunch of developers cheering because Facebook has removed a key user data protection element in their insatiable quest to control as much of the Social Web as possible you have to wonder just who is the Web for anymore.

When you hear terms like we’re doing this to improve the social experience; which if anyone decides to look past the warm and fuzzy buzzwords, it is easy to see that this is more about improving the company’s social experience and ability to monetize our activity on the Web. What it isn’t about is us saying what will make our experience better and when we raise questions we are either lumped in with the open web freetards (like it’s a bad thing) or we’re some sort of troglodytes.

Sometimes it feels like Social Media is nothing more than one great big social experiment to see just how far we can be made to shift our perception of what privacy is. It isn’t a shift that is truly benefiting us in anyway. Is it really that important to know immediately what some person who has followed you is listening to? Is it really necessary that we know what some person who has friended you has spent or bought.

Any perceived value of things like this are only so because we are told that there is a value to knowing all this stuff immediately as it happens.

Oh there is a value but it isn’t to you or me because seriously just how much value are you getting by the tsunami of information that is flowing at you in real time from a thousand people, a hundred thousand people, or even a few hundred. Not to mention that the only reason you know these people, say 99% of them, is because you clicked on a follow or friend button somewhere.

No, the real value for all this information is to those whose jobs it is to convince us that privacy has changed, that we are social, that we all need to be a part of some larger social experience.

However the fact that people are so willing to blindly trade away their information and activity in exchange for some presumed social activity provided by companies in the business of making money from that information and activity – well that is depressing.

Where is the social technology, the social news, the social web?

Instead we get networks flooded by marketers looking for ways to manipulate us all under the guise of having conversations. Instead we get flooded with follow and friend requests where 4 out of 5 are spammers or marketers. Instead we get a Web that is being treated like a business acquisition where we are nothing more than shares to be bought and sold.

This is no longer your web or my web but rather the pitched corporate battle ground where things like privacy are looked upon as the mutual enemy and that we need to be coerced into believing that these companies know what is best for us.

It doesn’t matter that the Web is slowly becoming one or two off/on switches that control our online identity which can disappear should be ever be perceived to have stepped out of line. Our identity has become a commodity, which in itself is depressing but further compounded by the fact we don’t seem to care that it isn’t us controlling those switches.

The common refrain the past few days is that Facebook is on a march to take over the social web. The only problem is that the social web has already been taken over. It has been taken over by corporations, their marketers, PR firms and Facebook, and as much as they would love to con us into believing it is all about the conversation the reality it is all about funneling us into things like Facebook, Twitter and any number of cool networks.

posted April 29, 2010 12:10 AM         

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wogtTQs8Kzw

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We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique. --Benjamin Jowett