More than a phone with a GPS navigator

Fri Mar 28 10:26:39 CET 2008

On 2008年3月27日 21:56:17 +0100, Marco Trevisan (Treviño) 
<mail at 3v1n0.net> wrote:
>> * Track recall: if the device stores all your movements (or a rough 
>> list of areas visited) for the last few days, you could recall where 
>> you've been, when you came somewhere and when you left, which is 
>> sometimes handy. This includes finding that place again if you don't 
>> remember the way. Could also be used by sales agents, couriers etc to 
>> automatically report where they've been.

> You posted many intresting ideas, but this one should be well 
> implemented since it could infringe your privacy! So maybe this could be 
> applied if there's a kind of encryption of the data saved, or better, a 
> full disk filesystem encryption :P.

Any device with a web browser on it is a serious privacy concern anyway 
because the browser stores cookies, cached pages, history, sometimes 
passwords, etc, so encryption of sensitive data is something to think 
about in any case. However, it's unclear to me how some form of encryption 
could be implemented, more precisely, where the key material should come 
from. Is the user supposed to type a password to log into the phone? Only 
when turning it on or each time after a delay of inactivity? It would be a 
serious usability drawback, and most users would disable encryption or set 
a very weak password that's easy to type.
-- 
Alexey Feldgendler <alexey at feldgendler.ru>
[ICQ: 115226275] http://feldgendler.livejournal.com