Talk at ENRI

Yesterday I had the chance to give a talk about RFID at ENRI in Tokyo - the electronic navigation research institute. I gave a about RFID. We were discussion applications of RFID in airports such as baggage tracking in Hong Kong. The current base line is barcode which has read-rate of 98.2% and RFID would have to better - that's a tough baseline. However, only than handling costs will be cheaper and hopefully justify the investments. Another discussion was about active RFID tags used for freight containers disturbing the flight instruments of the air craft.

Traced by my credit card

I had a really pleasant arrival in Japan. Indeed looking into all the face-masks of custom official and police (swine disease!) looked scary. I was also a little bit worried when I had to identify myself as a potential threat admitting that I have visited the US less than 10days before. However, the countermeasures were quite funny: I received a white info slip where as the "good" ones received a yellow which, however, in the ende did not make a differences. I was neither temperature scanned nor treated differently, but I eagerly avoided to start any coughing;)

Finally, I just had to withdraw some money. For some reason both my debi-t and credit-card were always rejected - very annoying. I tried it several times at several machines. Suddenly, I received a phone call - what a surprise thanks to 3G I finally have a world-wide working phone. It was my credit card company asking me whether I would be in Japan, whow track & trace works: "Are you currently in Japan? Someone continously tried to withdraw more than 5000 swiss francs from your account...". Hmm, I had to admit that it was myself, stupid.

But the amazing thing was that they really have a real-time alert system revealing my stupid behavior on the spot: I had an order of magnitude wrong exchange rate in my mind...

That was just a big relief: if there is value you don't think about privacy!!!

Google Latitude - really feel what privacy means

Google Latitude [1] is a great service. You can install it on most mobile phone platforms (S60, PocketPC, Blackberry, iPhone/Android are yet to come) and can share location information with your friends on the mobile phone (or also on the PC) at differen levels of detail, no location sharing, city level, or precise location.
Having it installed for a few days I still experience it as a gadget, it's fun to check whether my and my colleague's actual location really matches with google's prediction and quite often it doesn't - anyway, that will change quickly, I'm sure.
The set-up of the application is rather simple, especially because of the fact that google already knows so much about me, I had been sharing with me them voluntaritly for quite a while: of course I use gmail, so I already have the account. The pic for my profile I just can take from picasa, I can link this blog to my profile, there might the social network, my experiences/videos on youtube...and the location, suddenly it fits altogether! I wonder how I react, when the US immigration officer tells me in ten years "you can keep you passport in your pocket, Florian, we saw you coming and have already identified you through your google acount!"...a new feature perhaps called google passport?
Currently, google latitude really reduces the where-are-you/when-do-you-arrive calls. While I'm cycling home, my wife can see which route I take, whether I go straight home or take some lovely detour through the forrest - and that's with my consent that she knows about it. I wonder though whether the police will bill me in ten years for all the one-ways I cycled through in the wrong direction. Currently, Google denies to store any tracks just the current position. But that could change and Google could report my sins...
I also wonder whether new services, let's call them 'correctizers', might appear that allow me to 'correct' my current location or also to 'repair' my history trace.
I don't think we will live in a big-brother world soon, I guess it will rather be the 'small brothers' we share information with either voluntarily or also by social pressure, [2] envisions this rather nicely.
What was also intriguing me is that most of my colleagues - researchers in ubicomp/internet of things areas, dealing with location-based services etc. - just declined my inquiry to share their location with me. Obviously, privacy becomes important when you really can feel it...

[1] www.google.com/latitude
[2] David Brin: The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?, Perseus Books Group, 1999.