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Opinion
It's Not Easy Being Red
6/7/2007
Editor's Note: If you have questions or comments for Terry, you can reach him in the IT Trends forum by clicking here.Uh oh, he's going to get all political. Nope. This has nothing to do with red state versus blue state, despite the political season. Nor has it anything to do with communist red, despite the current news about relations between the United States and Russia. It has to do with the proliferation of information that's getting closer and closer to home with each new information technology advance. The "Red Folk" I refer to in this title are people who have this natural urge to control things. For them, life is getting tough.
I recently wrote about Google's SketchUp's "Build Your Campus in 3D" competition, for which projects were submitted June 1. (See Augmenting Reality: Measuring It First.) In it, I referenced the privacy issues voiced by many people. Right around the same time, a news item titled The Google 'ick' Factor got a lot of attention and raised a whole heck of a lot of new privacy issues.
The feature provides high-resolution photos to enable street-level tours so users can get a more realistic, 360-degree look at places they might go or spots where they already have been. To guard against privacy intrusions, Google said all the photos were taken from vehicles driving along public streets during the past year. The photos will be periodically updated, but the company hasn't specified a timetable for doing so.
Now comes a news item about a suggestion from the Department of Homeland Security, DHS Wants Cell Phones to Detect Chemical, Radioactive Material.
At the 2007 DHS Science and Technology Stakeholders Conference, S&T Director of Innovation Roger McGinnis outlined how the system could work. Cell phone sensors would continually test the air for harmful compounds and digitally relay any information to a central monitoring system if they find anything amiss.The idea is called "Cell-All." Personally, I think it is genius. Kind of in the "SETI at Home" family of ideas and related to the
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S&T spokesman Christopher Kelly said the theoretical system's strength would lie in the sheer number of sensors. The cell phone sensors might be less sophisticated than highly advanced ones some developers are fitting into hand-held models, but they would make up for it in what Kelly called "ubiquitous detection."
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