More than a phone with a GPS navigator

Andy Green andy at openmoko.com
Fri Mar 28 10:51:14 CET 2008


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Somebody in the thread at some point said:

|> You posted many intresting ideas, but this one should be well
|> implemented since it could infringe your privacy! So maybe this could
|> be applied if there's a kind of encryption of the data saved, or
|> better, a full disk filesystem encryption :P.
|
| Any device with a web browser on it is a serious privacy concern anyway
| because the browser stores cookies, cached pages, history, sometimes
| passwords, etc, so encryption of sensitive data is something to think
| about in any case. However, it's unclear to me how some form of

Your desktop environment itself can be even worse than the browser... I
looked in these guys a few months ago and I suddenly had my memory
improved... going back years... whether that was just KDE I am dunno...

~ ~/.recently-used.xbel
~ ~/.recently-used
~ ~/.thumbnails/normal/*
~ ~/.thumbnails/large/*

To get back on-topic, it seems from reading the various ideas that are
floating around this area, what is needed is a daemon that scavenges
"location revisit events", this is pretty much the library scenario in
Alexey's post made general but using all the available location sensing.

We get very approximate "part of town" location information for free
from GSM cell number just by being a phone.  We get +/- 100m specific
location information from powering the WLAN and doing an AP scan
periodically, studying the AP MAC addresses we can hear beacons from.
So it can differentiate between being at home, office, lunch,
travelling, visiting and so on autonomously.

We don't neccesarily know the GPS coordinates or name of a location, but
with such a daemon we can pretty cheaply know if we are back there
without needing GPS, and we can recognize it as a "place" and subtly
change contexts on the phone, different background, as Alexey said ring
or vibrate, different sorting order for contacts based on who you
contacted from that place, etc.

- -Andy
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