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Hardware, Software & Security…

Have you ever thought you have heard or seen it all? Well, you haven’t! But, your phone has. That’s right. A whole new crop of mobile apps are capable of turning on your phone’s microphone and camera to both listen and see what you are doing and what is going on around you.
Over The Line?
So are these developers going over the line or is this a natural progression in giving the end user a more desirable experience? We all have used apps like SoundHound or Shazam but those are user invoked. Imagine having an app that sits on your phone in the background and whenever it hears a voice it recognizes it, then does something like play a sound, display a picture, pop up an ad or even suggest something for you to do? That’s what it has come to. In an age where everyone seemingly wants everyone else to know where they are or what they’re doing developers are filling the gaps and automating these processes.
Some Apps to look out for….
ShopKick is a mobile app that senses when you walk into a certain store and presents deals or rewards to you. This is a pretty neat idea but we all know where its going don’t we? I can only imagine that it knows where you are and if you walk into a store that is a competitor of one of their vendors it could pop an ad saying “What are you doing at Burger King? Here is a coupon for McDonald’s!” Can you imagine?
IntoNow is an app that listens to what shows you are watching on TV and then posts them on Facebook or Twitter so your friends can see what you are watching. I’m not one of those people that needs to have everyone else around me up to date on what I am doing. I’m pretty sure my family and friends could care less unless of course I am doing something really cool.
Color is an app that uses your mic and your camera to keep people online up to date as to where you are, who you are with and what you are doing. A constant stream of your doings that can be uploaded to the color network and to other color users around you. Their multilens feature allows you to see all pictures and videos of other color users nearby. These photos and videos are yours to keep. So if someone videos you doing something and posts that to their color account it is there forever. Yikes.

Apple Collecting Data?
I’m not going to say they are or they aren’t but it sure seems like they could. Apple has come under fire recently for keeping a database on your phone and on whatever computers you sync that phone to. This file is unencrypted and stores GPS locations where your phone is every 10 mins (give or take a minute) and that is whether or not you turn off location service. If you would like to see where you have been with your phone there is a neat application that runs on the mac called iPhoneTracker that will present a map with points based on the data in that database.
Consequences?
This is the never ending saga of information overload. Data is where the money is and companies are coming up with newer and extremely clever ways to collect even more data about you, the places you go, the shows you watch, the people you are with, everything. This data is the backbone for companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the advertising agencies that are looking to capitalize on that data. The problem is that this data is our essence, it’s what makes up who we are, we should hold it and protect it.