These days, if the average person's geographic location
is made public, that person usually is the one who made it
public using a service like Foursquare.
In the future, do we expect that to not be the case? If
Facebook opened up a facial recognition API, would we expect
that most public, geographic check-ins would instead be made
by third-party apps & hardware without consent of the
one who gets checked-in?
For example, I'm guessing many people would jump at the
chance to get free car insurance in exchange for mounting
a facial recognition scanner to the roof of their car. The
driver gets free insurance, and while driving to pick up
groceries, he uploads a few hundred people's locations to
some company's cloud.
I could see a bunch of new applications for data like
this. For example, if my company is competing with another
company, then I could pay $100 to use a search engine which
could tell me all the buildings that the competing CEO has
walked into over the past 2 years and which new clients
he/she has been meeting with this week.
These questions come to mind:
How is this good/bad? Is this inevitable? Does this
change human behavior in significant ways?
--
Lucas Cioffi
Charlottesville, VA
917-528-1831