iPhones and Location: Let’s Not Get Hysterical.

21 Apr

[UPDATE: Check out the latest installment, "iPhone/SpyPhone?—The Music Video!", with a soundtrack by David Byrne. You can also download a higher-res version of the video, my code changes for Pete Warden's iPhoneTracker, a prebuilt version of iPhoneTracker like the one I used to make the video, and a complete copy of The Wired CD, with a bunch of great, Creative Commons-licensed tunes from David Byrne, Spoon, Gilberto Gil, the Beastie Boys and many others for you to rip, reuse and remix! Read this post now, or weep tears the size of October cabbages later!]

[UPDATE: I've taken a closer look at the data by dumping out the database's CellLocation table to a spreadsheet, and mapping it over time. I've made a copy of the spreadsheet with the data available for download. See here for details.]

There’s been a lot of discussion of the discovery that there’s a database file called “consolidated.db” on your iPhone, full of latitude and longitude coordinates. Most of it has been completely hysterical, and not based on an actual look at the data involved.

I downloaded Peter Warden’s iPhoneTracker program, as well as the source code for it, and played around with it a good bit yesterday. I’m not done—I haven’t done a raw dump of the locations in the file yet—but I’ve been able to determine several things, the most important of which is that the iPhone is not “tracking your every move”, by any stretch of the imagination.

The default version of the program deliberately muddies the location by restricting the locations to a certain level of precision, and also aggregates its data by week. I modified it to increase that resolution by ten times,  and to aggregate the data on an daily, rather than a weekly basis. I discovered a number of interesting things.

First, note that there’s a slider along the bottom of the window, which is set to the extreme right, to show all locations no matter when they were collected. On the left side of the slider, there’s a “Play” button, which will animate the locations captured. You can also drag the slider’s “thumb” to see the data for an individual week (in the default version) or day, in my modified version.

Pete Warden’s iPhoneTracker program can be found here. If anyone wants to reproduce the various tweaks I made to adjust the location and time resolution to be finer, drop me a note, and I’ll get you some details.

First, here’s a map of Amsterdam, showing every single location it collected there during my time there last July 23. As you can see, for 24 hours time, it’s not showing very much detail at all as far as my movements go.

Second, here’s a shot showing all of the data for the following day, July 24. I spent that day in Amsterdam until the late afternoon, when I took a train down to Den Haag:

As you can see pretty clearly, my ride on a train between Amsterdam and Den Haag is not depicted with even the slightest degree of fidelity or accuracy.

I’ve noticed that the amount and timing of the data collected is very odd as well: I’ve got multi-day gaps in the data, as long as almost two weeks on one occasion. Some days’ data clearly contains information that couldn’t possible have been collected on that day.

A good example is the set of locations dated Christmas Day of last year:

I was in the Central Valley, in Le Grand (about 15 miles south of Merced) all day Christmas Day and I never left the house. Not only does this show locations stretching from Santa Cruz in the West to Merced in the East (a distance of some 130-140 miles), but it shows movement up and down I5 for a distance of about 80 miles or so.

So, it’s entirely unclear to me what this data actually represents. What it most certainly doesn’t represent is the phone’s “tracking your every move” as the histrionic writers at Wired and The Atlantic would like you to think…

[UPDATE: Exactly the same kind of information seems to be getting stored on Android phones. Here's an application you can use to dump it out...]

[UPDATED UPDATE: I've put up a follow-on posting, with some additional interesting information...]

Facebook Get Even Sillier

19 Apr

I’m not talking about the policies here, I’m talking about the implementation. A Canadian newspaper, the Examiner, is using Facebook’s much-touted commenting system on their site. When someone likes a comment you made there, or adds a comment to a thread in which you participated, you get a notification of it, right on Facebook. Innit cool?

Except that when you go to see what you’re being notified about, here’s what you get:

Facebook fails to trust itself. Should you?

You know, if you’re planning on hitting people with a nice “ARE YOU REALLY, REALLY SURE YOU KNOW WHAT THE HELL YOU’RE DOING!?” warning every time they go to see what’s happened on a site you sold your commenting system to in response to a notification YOU generated, that’s not actually going to prove to be a terribly effective sales tool.

Just sayin’.

[UPDATE: I posted something about this on my Facebook wall before I wrote this posting. When I went back to look, they'd fixed it. I'm starting to suspect them of following my account in order to see what's busted. If this keeps up, I may have to bill them.]

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The Pomodoro Technique

18 Apr

I Use the Pomodoro Technique

I’m going to be writing more about this shortly, as a follow-on to my previous posting on To-Do lists and their perils.

What Dead Parrots Have To Do With Software Development

18 Apr

Or “What Monty Python Taught Me About the Software Industry“. I’ve got a new article up on Software Quality Connection…

I’ll Know I’m In The Future When…

15 Apr

Harry McCracken posted an interesting article over on Technologizer on his “Four Technological Holy Grails”, and invited folks to suggest their own. (Harry’s, which are interesting choices, are “Painless Web Conferencing”, “Goof-Proof External Display Hookups”, “Point-and-shoot cameras which work truly great in low light”, and “synching that never screws up”.

Yeah, I’ve got a few things I’d love to see.

Universal smartphone docks. As smartphones get ever more capable (and an iPhone 4 has pretty good specs compared to a decent desktop system of five or six years ago), the main limitations on being able to no longer need a larger device to lug around much are the size of the screen and the lack of an actual keyboard (and pointing device?) If there were a way to dock “smart phones” to provide a large display and a full-size hardware keyboard, that would probably put another big nail in the market for “personal computers”, as we’ve known them, and make me very happy. I’ve made regular experiments at doing without a laptop, and only using an iPhone on various trips, with mixed success. Having a standard “smart phone docking station” in a hotel room, or a coffee shop, or other public locations would be great.

Working Notions of Identity and Reputation on the Web. Everyone knows that you’re going to replace several IQ points with increased blood pressure if you spend too much time reading comments on news articles and blog postings. One of the few actual values that Facebook has provided is a (vaguely) firmer notion of identity on the Web, and one of the things which has always dragged down the level of discussion—going back to USENET days—is the ease with which a commitment-free identity can be constructed and the lack of any notion of “reputation”, or what that identity’s opinions are worth in the view of others (who themselves would have “reputations” as well). There have been some not-very-useful efforts at such things (karma on Slashdot, etc.) but a scheme which provided a clear linkage between an “identity”—which could be pseudonymous, certainly: it’s persistence over time that allows an identity to establish a reputation—and some notion of “reputation” could allow people to cut away a lot of the crap “commentary”, and cut down on trolling by radically devaluing the “contributions” of sockpuppets, etc.

Action Streams Everywhere. The Action Streams effort is an attempt to “decentralize” what Facebook does, in effect. It’s a protocol consisting of verbs and objects to which the verbs can be applied, like “post” a “status”, “like” a “link”, “check in to” a “location”, “publish” a “photo”, etc. If every site could—under your control—provide a standardized update on your activities which could be collected and aggregated—with the ability to restrict access to particular groups and such—the way the RSS can be today, there wouldn’t be any need for something like Facebook any more. Yay.

Video On-The-Fly. While lots of phones give you the ability to shoot video, there’s not much in the way of editing capabilities for the most part. I love iMovie on the iPhone, but it’s still fairly limited, as are the overall video capabilities of the device itself. Obviously, there are going to be issues of how much you can do with screen size, but Apple’s demonstrated that it’s entirely possible to put together a decent-ish nonlinear editor that you can use on a 3.5-inch screen. The ability to shoot, edit and upload video in the field could, potentially, have as much of an impact on news-gathering and journalism as the camera did when it was first introduced, but with wider scope: lots of people have phones that have the capability to do this. We mostly need better lenses, better wireless data connections (in the States, anyway) and better software.

I could have come up with several more, like “The Internet of Everything Everywhere”—I’ve got a “smart meter” which lets me monitor my energy usage, and a smart router that, thanks to the FCC’s “Sam Knows” project, lets me monitor a variety of things about my Internet connection. When cars can, for instance, provide direct updates about the traffic conditions they’re in, that’s going to be an excellent thing…

Configuring and Removing Facebook Apps: Here’s How

14 Apr

Facebook seems to revel in making the things you want to do as difficult as possible, either by hiding the things you’re interested in at remote and undiscoverable locations, or by moving them around and changing them regularly.

I just caught a message from a friend who couldn’t work out how to remove a “rogue” app she’d managed to pick up. Since I’m certainly expecting to see more and more (and more!) “rogue” apps in the future, I thought it’s be good to lay out how to manage your Facebook apps, since it seems that a lot of people are actually unaware.

Pull down the “Account” menu in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen. Choose “Privacy Settings”.


At the bottom of the “Privacy Settings” screen, toward the left, there’s an “Apps and Websites” heading, with a link to “edit your settings”. Click on that.

Next, you’ll be taken to the page where you can remove and configure apps.

To remove apps, or configure the information they can get at, click the “Remove unwanted or spammy apps”. This will take you to a page where you can remove apps (by clicking on the “X” to the right of the app’s name) or configure them (by clicking on the “edit settings” link).

If you click on “Edit settings” for a particular app—I’ve used Posterous here—you’ll see the information that it can get to, and—for apps which can be configured, anyway—be able to turn on and off specific kinds of access. In the case of Posterous, all the accesses are required by the app, so if there’s anything in there that makes you uncomfortable, you have no choice but to remove it.

I’d strongly consider removing any app, except those which you knew were from trustworthy sources and which you really needed to use.

Did you know how to do this already? Did this help you?

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The Facebook Legal Follies Continue

12 Apr

No sooner does a Federal appeals court tell the Winkelvoss twins to take their $65 million and their million shares in Facebook, and get on with their lives, when yet another claimant to ownership of a big stake in the site comes out of the woodwork, and with a ream of what appears to be supporting email evidence. It was persuasive enough to convince the firm of  DLA Piper that he’s worth representing, and that probably says something.

The short version is that, in early 2003, Paul Ceglia advertised on craigslist for a developer to code a site he had in mind, called StreetFax.com, an ad to which a young Mark Zuckerberg responded with some interest. Zuckerberg wanted $1000 for the work, and asked Ceglia for another $1000 to support work on “the facebook site”. According to the contract, Zuckerberg offered Ceglia 50% of “the Facebook” (or “the Pagebook”, they were dithering over domain names and what to call it), with a penalty of 1% additional ownership to go to Ceglia if the project was late beyond a certain date (which it was—Ceglia’s produced an email from Zuckerberg complaining that, due to delays in the project, Ceglia would own 80% of the site, which seemed, to Zuckerberg, unfair).

When Ceglia—who’s no angel, he’s been charged with fraud in an unrelated case—first filed suit last year, Facebook denounced him as a conman, which—given his past record—seemed plausible. However, with the additional evidence in the amended complaint, it’s looking less certain that this is the case.

There’s a funny sort of pattern here: Zuckerberg gets support for his business ventures from people, like the Winkelvosses like Edward Savarin, and apparently like Paul Ceglia, and turns around and screws them when their backs are turned, at least according to the various complaints people have made. Ceglia’s just the latest one.

For his part, Zuckerberg feels his reputation’s been damaged. Go figure.

A couple of good stories on this at Business Insider and ZDNet.

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