Close-In Surveillance Using Your Phone’s Wi-Fi
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/11/close-in_survei.html
Schneier’s blog post contains links to other articles, but to me the more interesting was reading the comments. Of course, infosec people will whine, bitch and moan, but for the average user this is great. At work this morning a co-worker mentioned that some phone (I think he said iPhone, but wasn’t paying much attention at that moment) was listening to the conversation in the room and would pop up targeted ads related to the conversation. He was talking about how cool it would be to modify it slightly so it would recognize movies and pop up relevant, scene-specific information. I remarked that just the other day I was complaining that without Google I am a moron since I have stopped retaining information I can trivially look up, what about the next generation that never did learn anything? With the context specific information provided by the tools above, they literally don’t have to think about anything, the cloud does it for them. Since they won’t retain any information either, ‘truth’ will be whatever the app discloses to them at whatever instant they are talking about something.
A truly brave new world!
