Just curious...who funded Columbus? It's a dream of lot of people to sail in some interesting direction hoping to hit it big. I think it's important to have a vision (however approximate that might be). But not a lot of people can afford to sail towards that vision without caring to achieve shorter-term milestones. In the process though, you may learn something more about the reality that changes/influences your vision...
The arguments for and against could be evaluated better if someone can explain how one can misuse this service.
What ever it is that google is noting down about the broadcasting station and tagging it with its lat-long, if it also appears in some form in the packets that originate from a host behind this station, then some one can infer the geographic location of this traffic source. Is that the case here?
Unless that's the case, is there any other way someone can misuse this? The only other exploitation I see is tracking a router from it's point of sale to it's point of deployment and finding out the location of the buyer. Where else does the BSSID of the station appear other than within it's geographic neighborhood and the manufacturer's/retailer's database?
May be the database should not be indexed directly with this BSSID but a one-way hash of (BSSID, something-about-the-neighborhood) - to make sure no one can do an arbitrary lookup but will already need to be in the neighborhood of the station to make a successful query. At least it will raise the bar.
I in fact would like to use this in my app! Continuous location tracking using GPS drains out the battery so fast that it is not even an option for me. The significant location change accuracy is not good enough for what I'm doing. I'm trying to figure out how to use this service. Does any one know?
When people talk about NFC, most people seem to be talking about only payments. The article talks about other uses as well for NFC. To me, NFC is a bridge between the real world and the virtual world. I look at an NFC tag on an object or a physical entity as really a door that leads to its digital manifestation in the virtual world. Some things are done better (or can only be done) in the real world and some are done better in the virtual world. For example, walking into a store to take a look at the product and try it out for yourself has to be done in the real world! However, finding out what others think about it or it's pricing history is better done online. What NFC does is marry the two worlds seamlessly. Where previously the user had to do this manually on his phone while at the store, a scan of the NFC tag could readily bring up all the relevant information. Bar codes and QR codes make this possible as well - so I cannot quite answer yet why NFC tags would be better for this. But there are other cases of active-active interactions (as opposed to active-passive interactions) where a passive bar code or QR code wouldn't be enough. A good example of this is authenticating someone in person where authentication relies on both the physical proximity (which is established with an NFC scan) and a crypto protocol to establish the identity that is best handled by your mobile device. Mobile payments happens to be one use-case of the active-active interaction where physical proximity is transformed to an interaction in the virtual world. Admittedly the biggest use-case though.
NFC is easier for the customer compared to bar codes. They just have to touch the tag, whereas with barcodes they have to use a scanning app and so on...
