JustSpotted (YC S08): Celebrity Geo-Stalking In Real-Time(techcrunch.com) |
JustSpotted (YC S08): Celebrity Geo-Stalking In Real-Time(techcrunch.com) |
I realize that that sentence could arguably describe a number of mainstream startups. However, there's something more sinister and downright evil about this one in it's blatant disregard of common decency in the name of profits.
This type of reckless employment of modern data processing and search algorithms reminds me that as software engineers we have great power and thus great responsibility. Just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should. If we don't use our power ethically, then surely some politician some day with an axe to grind will ensure that we do. And a sad day that will be.
You are hoping the millions of software engineer out there don't produce something like this?
That is not going to happen. What you should be thinking of is ways to counteract such things. You can't just write code without sanitizing the input and don't expect somebody not test that you did. The same reasoning apply here, you should start thinking of profitable counter measures to render these guys useless.
[Side note: Just couple days ago someone reports a meeting between Microsoft and Adobe and Adobe stocks shot up 13%. This is one benefit of knowing where celebrity are located. But if you don't like it draw up your defense strategy.]
Just because our field is too immature to have such things doesn't make it any less important to call a spade a spade. Not all wars can be fought nor won through competition in the marketplace, as you suggest.
Defences against this type of application do need to be developed, and not just for celebrities, but for all of us. What happens in 20 years time when all of those security cameras have been networked, and hooked up to processing centres capable of identifying individual humans from the images. We're all going to be under the surveillance hammer, and it's time to start thinking about how we are going to deal with that as a reality. To be clear, I'm thinking mostly about what happens when such a surveillance system is compromised by hackers/dishonest users of the system.
I'm thinking that defences are going to look something like a combination of a webcrawler to detect when your location is being diffused online, along with legal provisions that specifically punish this type of action. We need to start thinking about this stuff now, becuase it's going to take a long time to get the new laws in place, and I for one would much rather that the laws get written before I need them, not after...
The first problem is one of being perceived as invading privacy. This creates all sorts of follow-on problems - Apple won't allow you in the Appstore, Google Maps will likely withdraw your permission to use that (as I think happened to Gawker). There are ways around these, but it makes it a murky business and complicates bringing in revenue.
In the UK (where celebrity magazines are huge), Papture have been doing all they can on this. There's not much hope of an exit - mainstream celebrity magazines would probably worry about stepping over the line in acquiring something so intrusive.
Potential revenue sources that I saw were paid-for SMS alerts whenever a particular celebrity is spotted (imagine the number of teenies following Justin Bieber). And perhaps paid for accounts allowing real-time access, while everything else is delayed by 2 hours (for safety reasons).
In the end I decided it wasn't something I wanted to be involved with from a reputational standpoint.
Reminds me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Execution_Channel where there is a blogger paid to post conspiracy theory nonsense by state security services to obscure the reality of various undercover operations.
It's probably clear that I don't respect either of these opinions, so I hope that you're arguing some finer point here that I'm missing.
If so, how to do you reconcile differences between laws and cultures? Shouldn't ethical conduct be universal?
Certainly you must concede that there are unethical behaviors that are lawful?