Ryan Boswell [dot] com
Always-On Location Data: The New World Order
Once again, the fear of privacy invasion through location tracking skyrockets as stories about Apple’s iOS devices “secretly” tracking and storing your location data on your device hit the internet. I’ve written up my thoughts a little bit about the whole issue a few times before, but I’ll address it in more detail this time.
I’ve said that I use Google Latitude to track my location and share it with a few select friends. One of the main reasons I used Latitude, however, is for my own personal interest. I like having a log of my location history spanning back months (and eventually years, once I’ve been using it long enough). It’s interesting to see my traveling habits and where I go at certain times of the day, week, or month. So I don’t generally have a problem with using a service like Latitude to track my location wherever I go, in fact I love it. I have GPS turned on at all times on my iPhone so that I get the most accurate location possible (which sometimes is still a ways off, but generally is pretty accurate), and I only ever turn it off if my battery is dangerously low and there’s no hope of getting to a charger anytime soon.
Now that it is extremely public knowledge that Apple’s iOS devices maintain a own location history log of their own, the debate has sparked up again surrounding always-on location services and how they can be a breach of privacy if not implemented correctly. I do agree that Apple should make information on how they use and collect location data a little more accessible and offer the option to not store the location if the end user doesn’t want to. But I do like the idea of having that data available if someone wanted it for their own use.
One useful tool that arose from the media storm around the iOS location storing is iPhoneTracker. It’s an OS X application that you can download and run to show you a time-lapse view of the location data that your iPhone saves. You’ll need to run it on a computer that has an iPhone backup stored on it for it to work, and it will auto-detect the most recent backup and find the location file if it exists. I’ve put in a screenshot of all of the location data that my iPhone has stored since I got a warranty replacement iPhone back in late February. As you can see I’ve travelled up and down the state of California in the past two months. I don’t know exactly what the different color dots mean, but I’ll take a wild guess and say that the large blue ones are 3G, smaller red is Edge, and the small orange ones are no data service. I may be wrong, but that seems to make sense.
It’ll be interesting to see what other applications may start popping up that make use of this particular set of location data in a more creative and useful way (Google Latitude/iOS Location Data mashup of some kind maybe?). I guess only time will tell.
Overall, I do welcome the new world order of having always-on location tracking. But only as long as the right precautions were taken to ensure that this data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.
Apple ID Account Headaches
Everyone and their mother probably has an Apple ID by now. If you’ve ever bought anything in iTues, you have one. In fact, judging from the user forums and blogs I’ve perused in the past, there are quite a few people that have 2 or 3. This last bit leads to a bit of a problem with managing your purchases. It’s hard to tell which account you purchased something from, and it’s a hassle to have to manage so many different accounts.
I myself have two accounts, one of them I’ve had for 6 years and is just a normal Apple ID account I setup when I got my first iPod back in 2005. The other is my MobileMe account I opened two and a half years ago. Up until the beginning of this year I didn’t have many problems with using the two accounts, I decided that I would keep my iTunes purchases all with my original account because I had been using it for just that for so long already. However, the headaches started when I made the decision earlier this year to only use my MobileMe account with the Mac App Store, while still making all of my normal iTunes (music and iOS app) purchases with my original account. Now I have quite a number of purchases (hundreds in the case of my original account) split between two different accounts, and it is rather annoying.
While very few websites or services have the functionality to “merge” accounts, I don’t think I’ve ever heard more calls for it than with Apple IDs. As I mentioned previously, it seems that there are quite a few people who have multiple Apple IDs and have the desire to merge them into one account.
Technical Limitations
Unfortunately because of the way that Apple’s DRM works in iTunes and Mac App Store purchases, merging accounts is not a feasible process. Basically, everything you purchase from the iTunes or Mac App stores is tagged with your username. This is how Apple’s DRM verifies that you own the content and are able to use it. Now, what happens to all of those files if your username changes or is merged with another one? Well, technically your old username is no longer yours and therefore, there is no way to verify that you are that same person and the files become useless because the DRM engine won’t allow you access to them. But there are two ways that I could see Apple handling this problem.
Solution 1: Apple introduces the ability to “transfer” your purchases from one account to another (and subsequently deleting the “empty” account). Just as with iTunes Plus, if you want to merge your account, you’ll need to re-download all of your purchases, tagged with your new username (or rather the username that you have chosen to continue with). This solves the issue of authenticating users to their purchases. Additionally, any files previously tagged with your old username become de-authorized, requiring you to replace them with the updated copies, ensuring that there is no cheating the system by maintaining multiple copies of your purchases. However, this solution can be bandwidth intensive if, like me, you’ve had an account for a while and have made more than just a few purchases. This increases costs for Apple and it increases convenience for the end user because they have to take the time to re-download all of their purchases and make sure that there aren’t any old ones left lying around.
Solution 2: Apple introduces the ability to tie two (or more) accounts together. You would be required to select one primary account to proceed with, all future purchases are made using that account. All of your other accounts are then tied to this primary account and act as aliases. This way, all of your previous purchases will continue to function properly. You would only need to authenticate yourself with your primary account and Apple’s DRM servers would acknowledge that that account is verified for all of your “alias” accounts.
Of the two solutions I came up with, the second is probably the simplest and most seamless, not to mention cost-effective, but the first would be the most streamline and would eliminate the overhead of retaining the “duplicate” alias accounts and their information. Of course, I don’t know exactly how Apple structures their user databases and which way would in reality be easier or the best solution. Both methods would require a lot of changes and additions to the way their systems work, but primarily in different areas.
Ultimately, it’s up to Apple to determine how this situation will be resolved, if it will ever be addressed. At this point, I’m not sure if Apple will ever deal with this issue, but it would be nice if they did.
OCR Powered Mobile Credit Card Payments
The use of OCR technology to facilitate financial transactions is gaining a lot of traction lately. Banks have started using the technology to glean information from checks in ATMs so that customers only have to insert a stack of checks and verify that the auto-detected amounts are correct rather than manually enter the amounts. Some banks are also expanding this technology to mobile ATMs, such as Chase allowing customers to take pictures of checks using their smart phones and use that image to deposit checks. I’ve used the Chase mobile app on my iPhone before, and it works pretty well, using a cloud-based version of the same process that ATMs use.
The next step of using OCR for payments is apparently in the Credit Card payments sector. Mobile Credit Card payments are becoming quite popular in recent months with hardware scanners/swipe accessories. AisleBuyer is now using the same methodology as mobile banking apps do with depositing checks. By taking a picture of the customer’s credit card, the app uses OCR to extract the credit card number and use that to process the transaction. With no need for potentially expensive hardware accessories, the barrier for entry to mobile credit card payments is drastically lowered.
As a tech enthusiast, I think this is an awesome idea and will make life so much easier for people that want to take mobile credit card payments.
But on a more personal level, I am wary about using this just because I still am uncomfortable with the possibility of someone having a picture of my credit card. I feel like this is going to be a major hurdle for adoption and use of this method of mobile payments. I’m sure that AisleBuyer actually does discard the image once the credit card number is extracted, but the thought of someone hacking the application and using some kind of cache does make me a little uneasy about the idea. I guess only time will tell how society as a whole feels about this particular technology.
Good E-Commerce Checkout Design
Great timing for this article providing some great tips on good e-commerce checkout design. Right now, one of my major projects is an e-commerce driven website, and thankfully I haven’t really done much work on the checkout process at this point, so I’ll definitely be sure to take all of that into consideration. It might be worth a read if you’re interested in usability stuff or you yourself are working (or may in the future) on an e-commerce website.
Mac App Store Woes
After using the Mac App Store for 3 months, I’ve got some additions to my original thoughts on the matter.
App Updates
One of my biggest complaints thus far is in updating applications. I don’t understand why I have such trouble in doing this. Ideally, when you need to update an Application, you open the App Store, go to the Updates tab, and click “Update” next to the application. Secondarily you should be able to click “Update” next to the Application in Purchases tab. But I have yet to have the ability to update an application this simply. For the purposes of an example, I will use Sparrow, a wonderful mail Application that I purchased a few months ago.
Twice have updates been released since I purchased it. The first time, two days after the update was released, it still hadn’t shown up in my account (even though the version numbers in the store and the app were different). So I decided I would try deleting and reinstalling the app. That almost resulted in having to re-purchase the app all-together since it still didn’t show up as available for Update or even Install. As it turns out, I didn’t delete the library files so that the Mac Store didn’t recognize the Application as installed. Once that was done I was able to reinstall the application (with the updated version), but it also meant I had to re-set all of my preferences and re-add all of my mail accounts (4 in total, I wear many hats).
Fast forward a few weeks to the most recent update. I got a notification from Sparrow that an update was available in the App Store so I popped over to update the application. This time around, the application does show up as needing an update in the Purchases tab (yet the Updates tab still claims that all my apps are up to date), so I click Update, and get an odd message: “You have updates available for other accounts. To update this application, sign in to the account you used to purchase it.” Great, the only problem is that I’ve only ever used one account with the App Store, and I am signed in with it. So I decided to sign out and then back in, hoping there was maybe some glitch with my current session that was causing a problem. Nope. I got the same error again.
Then, hoping maybe it was just a problem with updating that one application, I tried updating another app that needed it. Again, it seemed to think I was signed into the wrong account.
At this point, I have yet to update the application because of these weird issues, and I am in no hurry to uninstall the application and reinstall it just to upgrade to a new version again. I’m starting to regret my choice to start using the Mac App Store so quickly, it seems there are still many problems that Apple needs to work out for this to become a viable option for app distribution.
If anyone else has had these issues and has found a way to fix them, please do let me know in the comments below.
Update 4/13/11: After contacting Apple support about my problem and going in circles with the support staff assigned to my ticket, it seems that this is an issue APple is aware of and is working to resolve quickly. I was told that uninstalling and re-installing the application should fix the problem (even though that’s exactly what I did previously). If I find any more details about the situation I will update this post.
Limitations of Google Apps Accounts
Ever since Google launched Google Apps, they have kept a distinct barrier between regular Google accounts and accounts created within a Google Apps domain. Up until recently there was a complete separation of the two account systems. But Google has been making strides in recent months, rolling out access to more and more of their products and services to Google Apps customers. However, there is still some discrepancy in product availability depending on your account type.
One of the reasons that this roll-out takes time is that in some situations, there is sensitive and private data being stored by the product or service (more on that below) and so there is debate on what products should be allowed in Google Apps, because an Apps Administrator has access to all data associated with a sub-account, which may be a breach of privacy.
While I do understand their reasons for disabling these services under Google Apps, I think that at the very least two of the four services that are currently unavailable should be enabled: Profiles and Buzz. I can see very legitimate arguments for Health and Powermeter because they do store personally sensitive information about people, Health most of all. While I do find it a pain that I am forced to keep a separate account just for use with Health (I don’t use Powermeter), I can ignore that personally because I created a separate one to begin with for increased privacy/protection of my data, since no one else even knows the email address associated with the account.
However, Profiles and Buzz could be very useful for Google Apps customers. For example, a Google Apps Administrator may have the ability to customize the appearance (minimally, of course, maybe the addition of a logo, similar to the control panel customizations already available) of Profiles pages to make it known that this is a company/organization related profile, possibly offering a higher level of credibility. Similarly, with this kind of brand connection to a Buzz account, it could be used for more official purposes like Twitter accounts and Facebook Pages are currently used by companies. There isn’t anything inherently private about the data hosted by either of these applications (especially with Google’s recent push to make all profiles public) that could be misused by a nosy Administrator, at least nothing more personal than email communications or Latitude (which, surprisingly, is enabled for Google Apps despite the intensely personal nature of that data it collects and stores).
Regardless, I am happy that Google has made the progress they have in enabling access to almost all of their products and services, but I do wish that they would hurry up with getting the rest of it transitioned over.
P.S. As a small side note in relation to Latitude, while the bulk of Latitude works just the same under both types of accounts, check-ins are currently disabled for Google Apps accounts, which is a little bothersome.
Amazon Wins the Music Locker Race
Even though there are rumors that both Google and Apple have music locker services in development, Amazon beat both of them to the punch today by launching their Cloud Drive and Cloud Player. Of course there are dozens of other music lockers services already, but none of them were launched or backed by companies like these three.
It’ll be interesting to see how this launch may affect the timing on announcements for both Google and Apple’s rumored services.
Customers Seeing Effects of Possible AT&T/T-Mobile Acquisition?
Disclaimer: I have no idea what the validity of any of this is, so far I’m only relaying what I’ve heard from friends and colleagues of mine and seen for myself on one occasion.
Over the past few days, a few T-Mobile customers have experienced improved coverage in areas that they had previously had poor coverage, along with the interesting phenomenon that AT&T is showing up as the ‘service provider’ in the menu bar of their cell phone display. While both companies do use the same network protocol, I do find it strange that there is such a push to make these changes apparent so soon. Since cell towers record vast amounts of user data, partially for billing purposes, I do wonder how that exchange of user information is being handled legally with T-Mobile customers connecting to AT&T towers (and possibly vice-versa, but I haven’t seen this myself, or heard of any of these cases).
One possible reason that there is such an immediate push to expand AT&T service to T-Mobile customers is to support their claim of helping expand service to millions of existing T-Mobile customers and that a combined company would greatly benefit customers of both companies. With the ability to gather data on just how much they are able to provide to T-Mobile customers and then presenting this to the Department of Justice in the inevitable hearings regarding the acquisition, they can make a much stronger case than what they have now.
Of course all of this may just be some big misunderstanding and I may be making much ado about nothing. I guess only time will tell.
The Truth About Being “Open”
Being the Apple fan that I am, it’s no secret that I prefer iOS to Android. But being the technologist that I am, I do admit that there are several redeeming qualities of Android that I like. I also think that one platform shouldn’t have an absolute monopoly in the market, because that can stifle innovation, so healthy competition is good.
One of the things I’ve always been intrigued about with Android was the decision to make it open source. When Google announced Android, they made a lot of noise about being Open. And they haven’t stopped tooting that horn. They take every opportunity to remind the world that Android is Open. Well, as it turns out, that’s not so true. Now the question is if Google will keep touting just how Open Android is.
The Big Hubbub About Big Data
In recent months, I’ve become more and more interested in the idea of Big Data. I am absolutely fascinated by the potential that is stored in those massive heaps of information. I’ve talked to several people about it, and at this point, it is very hard for me to give a single example of what I want to do with it, and so I end up giving many examples of the kinds of things you can do, and are already being done.
Yesterday, GigaOM hosted the Structure Big Data conference in New York City. A lot of things came out of that, and all of it really good and interesting information and ideas on the current state and possible future using Big Data. I couldn’t decide on any one (or two) thing to write about, so instead I’m just going to link to their live coverage page. While it’s not so live anymore since the conference was yesterday, it is the central repository for all the GigaOM coverage of the event and links to articles with more detail of the discussions and presentation that took place. If you’re at all interested in Big Data, I highly recommend taking a look at all that.
