Acting as cheap flying cameras, drones already raise a lot of questions about privacy. But it's not just aerial photography people should worry about with drones. Earlier this month, AdNear, a Singaporean marketing company, flew drones with sensors that could detect cell phone signal strength and WiFi over part of Los Angeles. The drones identified and located people by the devices in their pockets, so that businesses could send highly-specific ads to their smartphones. The company praised this cyberpunk dystopian idea in a blog post, saying:
Even disregarding the content of a call, cell phones reveal a wealth of information about the person making the call. Called "metadata," that bundle of other information can include the time the call took place, the call duration, the company that carried the call, and the cell towers that transmitted the call, giving a rough approximation of the callers' physical locations. Last summer news broke that the U.S. government was storing cell phone metadata. Yesterday, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in USA v. Quartavious Davis that Fourth Amendment protections against against unreasonable searches and seizures and the issuing of warrants without probable cause extend to cell phone location data.
Concerns about the health risks associated with cell phones date back almost to the dawn of the industry. Over the last four decades, while cell phones shrunk and multiplied and worked their way into the very fabric of human existence, the vague threat of danger has slunk along behind like a faint but troubling and unshakeable odor: do what they could, scientists couldn't quite eliminate it, and they couldn't quite define it, either. The best they've been able to do is say that the radiation coming from cell phones may or may not cause cancer.
Plenty of hay has been made over which apps and cell phones track our movements, but so far it has been difficult to accurately determine where we're going next - people can be unpredictable, after all, and make dinner plans at random new places on a whim. In that case, what's a prediction algorithm to do? Track all your friends, too, it turns out.
Most cell phones are pretty good at auto-correcting the errant spelling and punctuation that can ensue when you're typing while furious, or sad, or gleeful. But what if the messages you're sending could also convey those emotions embedded in your words? RIM filed a patent for just such a messaging system, which can determine the emotional context of a text in a way that goes beyond the little :-) we all know.
It was bound to happen and we can't say we're surprised that the forward-leaning Virgin Atlantic is the one doing it. As of yesterday passengers aboard Virgin's new Airbus A330-300 aircraft flying London-NYC routes can use their cell phones to make calls from 10,000 metres. Customers will also be able to send text messages and access the Web via GPRS. The only restrictions on usage will be during takeoff and landing or within 400 kilometres of US airspace.
