My friend Pete Warden does a splendid job of data mining, of analyzing the information that companies make available and/or track, but without telling us exactly what they’re doing. His last adventure was with Facebook, where his data analysis got him into hot water with the notoriously lax company (see his blog post I got sued by Facebook).

This time he and fellow researcher Alasdair Allan have stumbled into something rather astonishing: a time-based archive of iPhone lat/long locations where you’ve used your phone. Better yet, they wrote an open source app called iPhoneTracker that lets you visualize the data so you can understand what’s going on. A caveat: iPhoneTracker is quite clearly not intended to be a polished application with a fully implemented interface but rather a tool to let you see your own tracking information. It reveals alarming data pulled out of your primary iPhone backup file.

(more…)

Google’s dream of creating a mobile payment facility is one step closer with Google close to finalizing a deal with MasterCard and Citigroup that will see Android powered devices embedded with technology that allows customers to make purchases directly through their phone at the check-out.

By using near field communication technology (NFC), Google hopes to make credit and debit cards a thing of the past. If the deal goes ahead then customers with a android powered phone will simply wave their phone in front of a small reader installed at the cash counter and the payment will be processed. The idea is to turn the phones into a kind of electronic wallet.

(more…)