History of Money: Will Cell Phones Replace Wallets?
By Barry Ritholtz - March 29th, 2011, 3:00PM
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Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
March 29th, 2011 at 6:18 pm
Via: New York Times:
A favorite pastime of Internet users is to share their location: services like Google Latitude can inform friends when you are nearby; another, Foursquare, has turned reporting these updates into a game.
But as a German Green party politician, Malte Spitz, recently learned, we are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not. Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts.
The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin.
Mr. Spitz has provided a rare glimpse — an unprecedented one, privacy experts say — of what is being collected as we walk around with our phones. Unlike many online services and Web sites that must send “cookies” to a user’s computer to try to link its traffic to a specific person, cellphone companies simply have to sit back and hit “record.”
“We are all walking around with little tags, and our tag has a phone number associated with it, who we called and what we do with the phone,” said Sarah E. Williams, an expert on graphic information at Columbia University’s architecture school. “We don’t even know we are giving up that data.”
http://cryptogon.com/?p=21484
Flashback 2007: Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation
http://cryptogon.com/?p=956
March 29th, 2011 at 7:07 pm
Windows Phone 7 Predicted To Beat Apple iPhone
http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal-tech/smart-phones/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229400529
OMG! Someone is making a prediction! …about the future!! …snickers…
That must mean it’s time to sell APPL. Since predictions about the future are always so accurate. He has all sorts of fancy CHARTS! and GRAPHS! …and even FAITH in the power of MSFT. Haha! HaHaHa, of course, it’s just a little humor, what do the kids say today? LOL. Hahaha…
…Now, back to the much more serious business of predicting stock and prices …based on charts and graphs and my faith in my beliefs.
March 29th, 2011 at 8:29 pm
Back in the late 60s Business Week had an article on the future of electronic money complete with a great drawing showing a typical future street scene, complete with a panhandler holding sort of a walkie talkie and begging for a few electrocredits. We’re almost there!
March 29th, 2011 at 9:13 pm
FED chairmen of the future can write about texting money instead of dropping it from helicopters.
March 30th, 2011 at 12:09 am
Electronic money may be effective as a medium of exchange, but fails miserably as a store of value. As a store of value, I prefer something which retains it’s value during inflation. As a medium exchange, I prefer a credit card, which is an interest free loan with a 1% rebate.
March 30th, 2011 at 12:18 am
@Mark E Hoffer cited the NYT in saying: “…Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved … longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times.” And “Sarah E. Williams, an expert on graphic information at Columbia University’s architecture school [said], ‘We don’t even know we are giving up that data.’ ’
Goodness, an expert on graphic design who hasn’t put 2+2 together to realize that if your cell provider doesn’t know how to reach you, it can’t route calls to you.
That much is (what I thought was simple) engineering. Why the cell companies retain the data, and how they divulge it (and that would almost exclusively mean, in response to an official government request, in theory?), are matters of policy and discussion. But let’s not play stupid in order to suggest that some change in our cowry shells is inherently a privacy threat.
March 30th, 2011 at 9:32 am
Unlike the cowry shell days, we live in a complex technological era and the majority of people not only do not understand how that tech works, they do not even think about it. It is about complexity not “stupidity”. I have worked with computers for 35 years and there is still more that I don’t know than what I know – and the gap gets wider every year just from the sheer volume and speed of change!
The issue is not that the data is collected, it is that it is retained and who has access to it: perhaps snooping employees, a lawyer suing you, or a stalker who hacks into it, just to mention a couple of examples from the misuses of other electronic data.
March 30th, 2011 at 4:33 pm
Check out alternative monetaty systems, such as http://www.Bitcoin.org
While it is difficult to guage the inflection point, confidence is fickle and fleeting.