“Did you know that on Android apps can talk to your phone’s radios? And that those same APIs are NOT available on Apple or Microsoft’s platforms?” Robert Scoble asks for Scobleizer.
“What does this do? It lets you crowd-source the wireless map of signals in a room. See, if you didn’t know this you can figure out what room of my house you are in just by looking at the WIFI signal,” Scoble reports. “I’ve used an app called Walkbase to demonstrate just how this works.”
Scoble writes, “Google is an intent-satisfaction system if you think about it long enough. Certainly its advertising arm is. What do I mean? Well, if you intend to buy a Nikon camera today Google can help you with that. Or, if you intend to eat dinner tonight at a great sushi place in San Francisco Google can help you with that too.”
“What’s some intent that Google hasn’t been able to help you with? Well, when you walk into a store, for instance, you did that with some intent,” Scoble writes. “So, now that Google knows you’re in a very specific store it could serve you new kinds of advertising and if it tracked you over time it would get better and better at suggesting things to you.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
Shades of “Minority Report”!
Google introduces new Android app “Backseat Driver.”
…I’d still rather have the implant.
I’d rather SHE have the implant. They really are quite nice if done properly. 🙂
Does anyone really think it was an accident that Google released a “user study” showing how important location data was for mobile advertising *the day after* Apple made their location tracking policy clear?
http://themacadvocate.com/2011/04/28/google-switches-to-cya-mode-location-based-mobile-ads-are-awesome/
If this dickhead doesn’t know which room in the house he’s in & needs Google to help tell him where exactly he is in his own house then all I can say is be prepared to be swallowed by the maw of Google’s advertising jaws.
I would rather have Apple’s model of approximate location spotting so I don’t get my precise location sold to Kleenex if I’m sitting in the toilet & need my bottom wiped.
F@ck Google & all their mindless minions.
Wait, you got it all wrong. This is big brother all over again.
Google will know whether you are in the bedroom, so it can serve ads for sex toys.
There is a danger, however, when you go into a store, what would the store owner think if he knew that Google was serving “related” ads to your phone about goods in competing stores?
How long will it take until humanity wakes up to the fact that any advertising you can’t opt out of without sacrificing useful content – ie most advertising – is nothing less than slavery of the mind.
Uhuh right. And Apple has only the best intentions for gathering and storing (oh that was a bug) your info? C’mon, grow up fanboy.
Google’s intent isn’t that I get great meal or buy on that camera. Let’s be real their intent is to sell an ad to as many vendors as possible whose intent is to get me to select them as a place to part with my money. And the idea that a vendor wants to give me a discount as I walk thru the door on what they know I plan on buying, please.
I hate it when a company says that their bad behavior is important to their business and therefor OK. If that logic really worked then no one would go to jail for any crime that was committed for profit.
A pimp could argue that kidnapping, intimidation, sexual abuse and exploitation and even murder are all good because they have a positive effect on his bottom line.
I wanna see those $tupids that says they changed from iPhone to Android because they didn’t wanted to be tracked down. Not that they realized that google track them down with that much of detail, are they going back to iPhone?
First, I don’t think they did have a iPhone.
Second, it as all about morons hating apple just because apple is good, nothing else, or may be they were rape by an apple employee when they were younger.
I think the only real problem will be if it is discovered that disabling the location tracking in Android still leaves you in a state of google collecting the location data without you knowing.
Beyond the educational aspect I don’t really see the big deal.
If it turns up that when I turn off location tracking in Android and they are still tracking me anyway then I’ll be a bit annoyed and want some answers.
Yet most of the big media and so called real journalist are all fixated at putting Apple through the coals. Politicians, bloggers, tech experts all ready to hang Apple, yet keeping quiet on Google.
Helps to explain the lesser battery life of an Android device now, doesn’t it? After all, if Android and its apps are constantly telling Google where you are, it’s got to be activating the radios and transmitting, which takes much more power than passively listening for a signal to come to you (i.e., a phone call).