(Photo: Facebook)

A company that everyone trusts wholeheartedly with the troves of personal data you've turned over is reportedly developing an app that will further engender great faith and confidence from the public.

Just kidding, it's Facebook. Facebook is doing another creepy thing because it is a day that ends in "y."

Bloomberg reports that a number of sources close to the company revealed that Facebook is planning to roll out a location-tracking app in mid-March. The app would use GPS data to help users find nearby friends--hold back the tears, Foursquare!--but really it would allow the company to serve more specific ads.

If it stopped there, the app wouldn’t be much different from what's already in the market. But Bloomberg's sources also said that the app would collect location-data even when it wasn't open, effectively tracing your location forever and ever and ever regardless of whether you're actually using the app. God, the future sucks.

Bloomberg also points out that Facebook would most likely have to prompt users to agree to letting it track their location, but that "Facebook may have already gotten consent from its users to run such a feature." Cue ominous music.

Facebook declined to confirm the report, but perhaps it's time to rejigger your privacy settings. Yes, again.

(Photo: Umich.edu)

Enterprising pillheads hoping to snag a supply of Percs from the local Duane Reade might have an extra layer of security to contend with soon. The NYPD is asking pharmacies in the New York area to outfit fake pill bottles with GPS technology to help the force catch pill-popping thieves. Well, can't say they're not creative.

The Washington Post reports that NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly is slated to reveal the new tech-friendly way to catch thieves at a health conference in California today. The move comes in response to the thriving black market for prescription pain medicines, and will be included with a number of suggestions that officers will roll out to local pharmacies in the coming weeks.

Of course, by telling the press about the plan, drug thieves now know to keep an eye out for GPS trackers in their stolen pill bottles, but what do we know about police work?

In yr phone, sendin you the wrong location. (Photo: Biz Journal)

As anyone who has used a map app recently will tell you, GPS location is still a pretty imperfect science. Sadly, we don't think that will be any comfort to Wayne Dobson, a 59-year-old Las Vegas man who has fallen victim to a glitch with Sprint Wireless's GPS technology. The problem has dispatched scores of people who lost their cell phones to his front door demanding he give them their phones back.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that Sprint can track the location of a lost or stolen cell phone within 50 to 300 meters and send that information to law enforcement. But a glitch with Sprint is pinpointing Mr. Dobson's house as the epicenter of tons of stolen phones, even though he's had nothing to do with them. To make matters worse, when police triangulate 911 calls made from cell phones near his home, the glitch frequently makes it seem as if the call came from Mr. Dobson's house.

"Lucky me, huh," he told the Review-Journal, sounding kiiiind of like Eeyore. "I couldn't be the multimillion-dollar winner. No. I'd rather have that problem."

Mr. Dobson has resorted to putting a sign outside his house that reads, "NO LOST CELL PHONES!!" Dude doesn't have your phone, okay?

This is the kind of thing that would be really novel at first--an interesting story to tell your friends over dinner, perhaps--but get old realllly quickly. Mr. Dobson has resorted to sleeping by his door so he can shoo away angry people in search of their phones at all hours of the night.

Sprint says it is investigating the glitch, so it should be fixed in the next 10-20 years.

(Photo: Google Play store)

When Google launched its new worldwide alternative reality game earlier this month, the web lit up with widespread questions. The game, called Ingress, allows users to move through the physical world with their Android devices, collecting pockets of energy in various locations that they can then use to complete virtual quests. It was an interesting idea, but on the surface appeared to not make any significant contributions to the company's bottom line. Why would Google, which has $217.59 billion market cap, allocate time and resources to a free Android game?

Technology Review called it "augmented reality's first killer app." AllThingsD reported that because the game incorporates real stores and businesses into its plotline, it's a natural next-level venue for advertisers--Zipcar, Jamba Juice and Chrome apparel have already all signs on to host ads on Ingress.

PandoDaily, meanwhile, pointed out the potential privacy violations that could occur when a game constantly requires users to record their GPS location:

Google has created an elaborate ruse to convince (possibly hundreds of) millions of people to share far more location and behavior data with the company than has ever been the case before.

And if there’s one thing Google can’t get enough of it’s data. The company made its fortunes by collecting more data (and better structuring and analyzing it into advertising opportunities) than any company in the world. Search history. Email correspondence. Maps usage. Content purchase and consumption. Google’s been watching. And it’s made billions off what it’s learned.

But there's another thing Ingress could do: Google could have its users help collect mapping data. (The company hasn't confirmed or denied this.) When playing Ingress, users are asked to explore walking trails, bike paths and other areas that haven't necessarily been documented by Google's StreetView cars. The geo data, photos and video recorded by game players is crucial in order for Google to successfully flesh out its walking maps. Knowing that even a company of its scale doesn't have the resources to map all walking paths across the world, Google has essentially convinced users to help them do their jobs by gamifying data collection.

If this tactic doesn't sound familiar, it should. Back in 2007, Google launched the GOOG-411 service, a free, voice-activated local search tool. Like Ingress, it seemed like a strange move at first: why would Google foot the bill for a Yellowpages-type service? But a few months after GOOG-411′s launch, then-VP of search products Marissa Mayer explained just why Google had decided to launch the service. GOOG-411 was collecting spoken syllables in order to build out its speech recognition tool, now employed widely across Android devices. But a few months after GOOG-411′s launch, Marissa Mayer, then-VP of search products, explained that GOOG-411 was collecting spoken syllables in order to build out its speech recognition tool, now employed widely across Android devices.

As Ms. Mayer told Infoworld in an interview in 2007:

You may have heard about our [directory assistance] 1-800-GOOG-411 service. Whether or not free-411 is a profitable business unto itself is yet to be seen. I myself am somewhat skeptical. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model ... that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search.

The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. ... So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we're trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy.

Ingress appears to be yet another version of this masked data collection strategy. By asking users to create new Portals, for example, Google could tap into a database of geo-tagged photos without ever having to head to the remote location themselves. After all, mapping the wilderness takes a fair amount of legwork. "You’ve seen our cars, trikes, snowmobiles and trolleys—but wheels only get you so far,” the company wrote back in June about its wilderness trekking camera. “There’s a whole wilderness out there that is only accessible by foot.”

Ingress creator John Hanke did not respond to a request for comment.

(Photo: Meme Generator)

Candy companies will go pretty far when it comes to Halloween time stunt advertising, but Swiss chocolatier Nestle has truly outdone itself this season. The York Press reports that the company has decided to embed a GPS device into the wrapper of some KitKat bars in a bizarre attempt to reward men for eating candy.

The campaign is casually titled "We Will Find You," and will award a 10,000 GBP prize to the six lucky winners who happen to find a tracking device embedded into an otherwise innocuous manufactured treat. The GPS device is activated by a special strip that will be pulled when customers open the candy bar, and a team of Nestle employees will be dispatched within 24 hours to reward the winner with their prize.

Considering no one except hoarders keep candy wrappers hanging around, we assume all the winners will be trash cans and misused recycling bins.

A Nestle spokesperson told The York Press, “We believe this promotion will particularly appeal to men, attracting them to the chocolate singles category and thus driving incremental sales.” Like war movies and video games, all dudes enjoy GPS technology. Everybody knows that.

But Americans need not worry about a candy company following them home. GPS devices will only be embedded in the wrappers of British candies like "KitKat 4 Finger, KitKat Chunky, Aero Peppermint Medium and Yorkie Milk," whatever those are.

(h/t PopSci)

via metro.co.uk

Of all of Google's bleeding edge projects and technologies--say cars that drive themselves or the Internet on your goddam face--there's only one Marissa Mayer described as futuristic during a recent Q&A at the 92nd Street Y: Indoor positioning systems. Google has already implemented the technology, which lets you locate yourself inside a building, on Google Maps for Android at Macy's flagship store (using the building's floor plan and Wifi readings) and all the transit stations in Tokyo.

"Even though I helped build it," Ms. Mayer told the crowd, "It's like scifi!"

Today Extreme Tech delves into the science and application of an Indoor Positioning System (IPS). "Believe it or not, we’re very nearly already there," says the blog, citing a new chip released by Broadcom called BCM4752 that supports IPS and will be coming soon to smartphones.

Because the science is new, there's no standardization yet. Google uses Wifi and 2D floor plans. Nokia, on the other hand, uses Bluetooth and 3D models. Acoustic analysis and infrared signals are also being tested. Neither method is really reliable on its own, but the Broadcom chip is a leap forward:

The Broadcom chip supports IPS through WiFi, Bluetooth, and even NFC. More importantly, though, the chip also ties in with other sensors, such as a phone’s gyroscope, magnetometer, accelerometer, and altimeter. Acting like a glorified pedometer, this Broadcom chip could almost track your movements without wireless network triangulation. It simply has to take note of your entry point (via GPS), and then count your steps (accelerometer), direction (gyroscope), and altitude (altimeter).

Before George Orwell starts rolling in his grave, it's worth noting that like GPS, IPS isn't necessarily sending exactly where you are at every single moment to third parties. "IPS can be entirely local to your smartphone (or other portable navigation device). IPS, like GPS, can establish a location fix completely passively."

Adoption is still a ways off. First the system needs to be built up, which will likely start in tourist hot spots, says Extreme Tech, allowing for "ample time to stage a rebellion."