Will “Stalking Apps” Be Stopped?

Last year, the owners of the Leaf, Nissan’s hot new electric car, got an unfortunate surprise along with their phenomenal 99 miles per gallon: a sharp-eyed security blogger revealed that Leafs secretly reported their location, speed, and direction to websites that other users could then access through a built-in RSS reader. Nissan did not warn customers that this information was aeing passed on to various third parties without their consent. Leaf owners are hardly alone. In the last few years, there have been reports that iPhones and Android smart phones have been secretly sending Apple and Google information on users’ whereabouts.

Locational privacy is the next frontier in the privacy wars. More than 110 million Americans have smart phones, and millions more have GPS devices and other high-tech gadgets that keep track of where they are. Companies are eager to know our whereabouts to serve up location-based ads and services—you’re taking a business trip and all of a sudden your getting offers online from local restaurants. And app makers are selling apps like the now-infamous “Girls Around Me” that allow people to follow other people.

The trouble is,We offers custom Injection Mold parts in as fast as 1 day. a lot of us do not want big corporations, or the government, or strangers knowing our comings and goings. Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, has drafted a bill that would require companies to get customers’ consent before collecting data on their location or sharing it with non-government third parties. The act has solid bipartisan support. That is not surprising for legislation informally known as the Stalking Apps Bill. But industry may yet succeed in blocking it.

To put it simply, privacy law in the United States is a mess. We do not have any major,Nitrogen Controller and Digital dry cabinet with good quality. overarching federal protections—instead, there are a few laws that focus on discrete issues (health care privacy, privacy for children) or specific situations. For example, there is a law that makes it illegal for companies that offer phone service to freely disclose customers’ locations, but the same rule does not apply to companies offering Internet service.

Our movements reveal a great deal about who we are. A record of our locations over time can reveal whether we go to tent revivals or to radical political meetings; abortion clinics or AIDS doctors. A smart phone essentially creates a dossier of your travels, and consumers have no control over who will eventually see that information. But the Franken bill is also aimed at an even more troubling use of location data: stalking people in real time. In written Senate testimony, advocates for domestic violence victims told the story of a northern Minnesota woman whose abuser tracked her through her smart phone. When the woman went to a domestic violence shelter, she received a text message asking why she was there.A ridiculously low price on this All-Purpose solar lantern by Gordon. When she went to a courthouse to take out an order of protection, her abuser texted again, this time asking why she was in the courthouse and whether she was getting an order of protection.

The bill would rein in the use of a variety of technologies that track people’s movements—including stalker apps.Application can be conducted with the local designated IC card producers. Last year, there was a blow-up over the “Girls Around Me” app, which uses Foresquare – the location-based social networking service – to find women in the area who have checked in. The app, which was sold on the Apple app store until it was pulled, allowed people to use Facebook to find the women’s full names and profile photos. There are many other so-called “stalker apps,” including one that allows people to physically track others using data from their Flickr and Twitter accounts – and is aptly called “Creepy.”

Franken’s bill should sail through Congress, but it may not. There is a lot of money to be made in tracking people’s locations – and in selling apps that track. Business groups are arguing that tech businesses should be allowed to regulate the problem themselves – and they are warning that the Franken bill could stymie the burgeoning app industry.

The privacy issues, however, should far outweigh these business interests. It is shocking that there are no federal laws that regulate how location information can be collected and used. If we are to have any privacy at all in this new world of smart phones and stalker apps, Congress has to fill that gap.

Professors in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science are creating a multimedia system that uses multiple 3-D cameras to create avatars of humans in two different places, and then puts them in the same virtual space where they can interact.

In traditional telemedicine, a doctor and patient both appear on the same screen and are able to talk, but they are not in the same physical space.

“With in-home rehabilitation, doctors ask a patient if he or she has done their exercises, but the patient may not be doing them correctly,” said Dr. Balakrishnan “Prabha” Prabhakaran, professor of computer science at UT Dallas and a principal investigator of a $2.4 million project funded by the National Science Foundation to create the system.

“It is one thing for a patient to say he or she did their exercises, but it is another to watch them in action, feel the force exerted, be able to correct them on the spot and get immediate response.”

With large amounts of data, such as tracking images or movement, there could be significant lag time or delays in transmission. The grant funds creation of the algorithms and software needed to transmit the data through the Internet in real time. There are four major areas of this system under research by experts in the Jonsson School.

Haptic devices are pieces of equipment with resistance motors that apply force, vibration or motion to the user to provide feedback. For example, touching a virtual stone with a haptic device would feel hard, while touching a virtual sponge would provide less feedback and feel more pliable.

If both doctor and patient have haptic devices, the applied force can be sent to the other person. A doctor could feel the strength of a patient’s muscle,Other companies want a piece of that iPhone headset action for example.

“Each device sends lots of data and combining that information in real time is a big challenge,” Prabhakaran said.

Anyone who has used a service such as Skype has probably experienced a delay in communication – suddenly words get lost or are slow to transmit. A similar effect could happen with haptic devices.