Greg Hollingsworth

This post is probably a little out of the ordinary, as I normally focus on politics, news, etc... but I've been feeling the effects of an ever-growing trend more than usual lately and it's really starting to bug me, so this will be a short rant. I am not the first person to speak out, Julien Smith did a fairly elegant job of it back in September, but I feel his sentiments need to be recalled, and amplified.

I was reminded of Julien's post the other night when we had dinner with some friends of ours. They are both apple apologists (and shall remain nameless, as they will undoubtedly now who they are, should they ever read this) and iPhone owners/users. They are fine people, with whom I share many common interests, except most notably for this post, the iPhone.

To be fair, only one of them pulled out the iPhone at all the entire night, but good lord, once it was out, it hardly went away. From checking sports scores to calculating the tip at the end of our meal. While I will admit that it's presence didn't bother me, I found myself thinking "is this what is coming? are we going to soon be so reliant on technology that we won't be able to do simple math without it, because we just can't be bothered to divide something by 10?".

Then, the first thing I see this morning is a post about Gowalla on one of my preferred communications blogs. Can someone please explain to me how turning your life into a GPS-based game is a good thing? First off, and maybe I'm just paranoid, but I'm a little concerned with the growing presence of GPS in our daily lives. I mean, you do realize that by having the GPS on your phone turned on at all times that means that someone, somewhere is recording every location you visit and storing that data? Not to get all conspiracy theory, big brother on this, but do you really want your phone company having a record of everywhere you've been in the last month? 

What is exceptionally hard for me to believe is how willing we seem to be as a society to open our lives up to the world in one area, yet expect to have our privacy guaranteed in others. Take the Facebook privacy settings everyone has been discussing this week for instance. Everyone is upset that FB changed their privacy settings and defaulted them to public, and that is totally understandable. FB users expect a certain level of privacy from that network, as that's always been one of the features. Yet I can tell you the favorite hangouts of many people I follow on twitter due to the numerous "I'm the mayor of..." posts from Foursquare. So no, I may not be able to see your personal photo albums, but I know that you're at Sam's coffeehouse 80 times a week. I ask you, which set of information is more valuable?

This is turning into a long rant, which was not my intent so I am going to cut this short by saying that these cries of outrage over FB privacy changes ring somewhat hollow to me coming from people who will allow an iPhone app to know their exact location 24 hours a day.