[1152] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Wacky app of the week: DriveMeCrazy "driver snitch"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (privacy@vortex.com)
Tue Jan 25 22:51:41 2011
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2011 19:37:48 -0800
To: privacy-list@vortex.com
Message-ID: <20110126033748.GA14464@vortex.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Disposition: inline
From: privacy@vortex.com
Reply-To: PRIVACY Forum mailing list <privacy@vortex.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Errors-To: privacy-bounces+privacy-forum=mit.edu@vortex.com
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Wacky app of the week: DriveMeCrazy "driver snitch" iPhone app
http://bit.ly/hvvCc1 (DriveMeCrazy)
OK, here's the drill. This iPhone app lets you play "driver snitch"
by injecting into a database the unconfirmed and unverifiable
claims of "bad driving" that you see -- which the site operator claims
can be searched (via license plate numbers) by DMVs, police, insurance
companies, and ... others. What's more, they promise to send the
data to DMVs on a regular basis (though they admit they have no idea
what gets done with this data -- presumably we all can guess how
useful such, uh ... "high quality" data would be).
And of course they also promise to hide the identity of anyone who
submits "bad driver reports" data into their system. So the data is
not only unconfirmed and unverified, but unattributed as well.
Obviously, the spoofing potential of this setup is immense -- fun with
license plate numbers! But the risks overall seem relatively low,
since any entity willing to trust such data as other than a source of
not very pseudo-random alphanumeric character sequences would be
foolish beyond measure.
But these days I consider any app or site that can make me chuckle to
have some amusement value at least -- and DriveMeCrazy certainly
qualifies on that score.
Oh, one warning. The actual site is in the rather esoteric ".mobi"
top level domain. Don't confuse it with the ".com" site of the same
name -- they sell sex toys. Yeah! Drive me crazy! Oops.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org
Founder:
- Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org
- Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance: http://www.gctip.org
- PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
Google Buzz: http://bit.ly/lauren-buzz
Quora: http://www.quora.com/Lauren-Weinstein
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com
_______________________________________________
privacy mailing list
http://lists.vortex.com/mailman/listinfo/privacy
