iFIND uses Wi-Fi hotspots and P2P comms to locate your friends
Locating pals at MIT, privately
CAMBRIDGE — A new friend-spotting software program will debut on the MIT campus today, allowing people to enjoy the social benefits of sharing their location without showing up on Big Brother’s radar screen.
The iFIND project turns every laptop into something like a precise Global Positioning System unit that can spot users — down to the room they’re sitting in — and then share that location with friends and colleagues, without uploading their personal information onto a central network.
“Nobody is looking at this approach,” said Carlo Ratti , director of the SENSEable City Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The present trend in the industry is toward collecting data. This gives control back to the individual. . . . It’s you who are calculating your location, and it’s you deciding when to make it public and to whom.”
Cellphone buddy finders already use GPS technology to allow people to “find” themselves on a map and broadcast that location, if they choose, to friends. But in order to share that information with friends, it has to be sent to a server. Cities across the country are starting to roll out municipal Wi Fi systems that will blanket large swaths of major urban areas.
iFIND offers a solution before the privacy advocates’ fears become reality. A laptop calculates a person’s location using Wi Fi access points, and then shares that information with the selected friends and colleagues on a peer-to-peer basis. People can chat, and eventually will be able to create profiles, but the network will never receive personal information.
Full OA by Carolyn Y. Johnson (Globe) is here