Where Have You Been?
Todd Humphreys
gave this TED
talk where he said that something happened on May 2nd, 2000 that
changed the world dramatically. No, not overnight; but within a decade as
smartphones took over the world. So what was that event?
“On that morning, U.S. President Bill
Clinton ordered that a special switch be thrown in the orbiting satellites of
the Global Positioning System. Instantaneously, every civilian GPS receiver
around the globe went from errors the size of a football field to errors the
size of a small room.”
Pretty soon, GPS
accuracy got even better:
“With more base stations, more ground
stations, better receivers and better algorithms, GPS can now not
only tell you what street you are on, but what part of the street.”
Fast forward to
present day when GPS and Big Data come together.
Recently, Google
launched a new feature called Your
Timeline. If you use Google Maps, the feature lets you “view the places
you’ve been on a given day, month or year”. One site
described it as “terrifyingly cool but terrifyingly scary”. The feature is
private and only visible to you. Google says the service allows users to delete
specific days or specific locations if they want to.
But all of that
is for now. How long it will be before Google “offers a way for multiple people
to compare location histories and identify dates and places where paths have
crossed”, asks
Thomas Ricker. It’s easy to imagine “dystopian outcomes” whenever that
happens. But here’s a positive one, says Ricker:
“Imagine a future where wedding invites
arrive decorated with GIFs showing a couple’s divergent location histories
merging to form a single path. Created automatically by Google Photos, of
course, complete with slideshow.”
Awww…that would
be so romantic. If it weren’t also so terrifying scary.
Interesting.
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