Friday, August 13, 2010

one little letter can make a big difference

I just read through one of those articles that automatically presents itself when I sign in online. The article is about geotagging technology that is part of many new phones and digital cameras, apparently. So, when we post pictures, there is information about the location of the photograph's subject embedded within the...digital code (I'm definitely no whiz when it comes to this kind of technology, which, yes, makes me uncomfortable).

I was reading through the comments on the piece and one commenter posted, "then osama can be tracked..." to which there are two responses that I can see. (The little "replies" tag under the comment says there are three replies, but I can only see two for some reason.) The first response reads, "Not since he's president. The secret services took his iphone away from him and (certainly) gave him scrutinized equipment precisely to avoid problems like these." The second reads, "Obama resides in upstate New York." I'm guessing (hoping) that the first person just misread the original commenter's comment. As for the second reply, I'm really not sure. I'd really like to know what the other comment was.

Huh.

3 comments:

lotsofglue said...

It's been awhile, so HI.
I agree with you that the instant geo tagging to very uncomfortable. What's more uncomfortable to me is that it is not the gov't but companies and people just agreeing that it is OK.
I read a comment regarding cell phone agreements, when added with Yahoo, was 97 pages long.
I have several friends that do not understand why Google is keeping track of what you look up, she thinks it is a good thing the internet will be personalized to her. I don't, I like randomness.

v said...

It *has* been a while. Hi! Hope all is going smoothly for you.

I'm pretty certain that I'll continue to surf the web, so to speak, even with the knowledge of all the tracking and whatnot. Ah, well.

v said...

I'll just try to keep informed and continually adjust privacy settings and whatnot.