Random Private Thoughts

To the naked eye, this looks like the average American home. ~ Gladys Kravitz

It pays to be a Peeping Tom

Attention job seekers!  The future is in: Snooping.

1. Watch where you’re driving because the Police sure are:

Massapequa Park will be the first Long Island municipality to use electronic sensors embedded in the street to detect illegally parked vehicles.

Can they detect illegal immigrants while they’re at it?

2. Good News! OnStar won’t track ex-subscribers after all!

The changes unveiled two weeks ago would have kept a data connection with any OnStar-equipped GM vehicle active unless an ex-subscriber specifically asked for it to be shut off. OnStar said it wanted to keep the connection alive to offer new services and alert vehicle owners in case of emergency or recalls — but also said it reserved the right to share or sell anonymous data about the vehicles it tracked to outsiders, including government agencies and marketers.

Phew. Close call. I’m sure that will be the last time we ever have to worry about something like that!

3.   Perfect!  Government getting even cozier with Facebook and Linked-in.  What could go wrong?

Facebook is also shifting its focus to “putting America back to work.” The company announced its new small-business education program Monday, which will partner with the National Federation of Independence Business and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to support small business owners through case studies and webinars.

Cantor said from the Speaker’s Balcony of the U.S. Capitol, previewing the Facebook event, that he initially began using Facebook to track his daughter’s use of the site, but hopes to use it as a political tool “to begin a process of speaking and listening.”

Mark Zuckerberg is the new king of  job creation!  Zuckerberg for President  King of the World!

4.   Creeped out by Facebook?    There’s always Google+…..

While circles might be wonderful, the reality is that when you share a very sensitive item to a circle made up of only your closest family members, you are also sharing that information with a large, publicly-traded, multinational corporation – a corporation whose primary business is collecting data about you and selling it. You see, Google is not your friend; in fact, you are not even Google’s customer.

Google is now combining the two most important data streams you have – your search history (which is probably as close as we have come to a map of the human mind) and your social graph (which tells data aggregators things about you that businesses have traditionally paid large amounts for) – to create an incredibly rich and detailed psychographic profile. A profile that we all offer up for free without hesitation.

You are the product Google sells to its customers.

Wow, I always hoped I would amount to something.

5.    And, finally, the app to end all  apps!

Mashing up face recognition technology, computer vision, cloud computing, and augmented reality with the complex digital lives many of us lead on the Internet, TAT has created an app that allows you to gather information on a person and their social networking life simply by pointing your camera phone at their face.

Dubbed Recognizr, the app essentially works like this: the user points the camera at a person across the room. Face recognition software creates a 3-D model of the person’s mug and sends it across a server where it’s matched with an identity in the database. A cloud server conducts the facial recognition since and sends back the subject’s name as well as links to any social networking sites the person has provided access to.

Oh, not to worry friends, the deal is you have to opt-in to the service to be identified. There now, don’t you feel better?