Originally published December 18 2005
MIT's new wireless internet tracks physical location of users
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The privacy of MIT students may be a concern because their physical location can now be tracked if they use the campus Wi-fi. An advantage of the tracking is that it allows students to view how many laptops are in particular area, or locate friends.
With items like Sony's ever-entertaining rootkit making mainstream news, your personal computer has suddenly become a very public place.
Now, new technology introduced at one of the United States' most prestigious research universities has the potential to make the privacy concern a matter of physical location instead of intellectual property.
The campus-wide wifi network is able to locate connected computers on a 3D plain, making it capable of distinguishing between computers logging in from different rooms and different floors within one building.
With user permission, names and locations are then displayed on monitors throughout MIT's campus.
Dr. Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory, understood this concern when the laboratory started work on the project, and helped build the school's new system with privacy issues in mind.
"It is impossible," Dr. Ratti says, referring to worries that an individual's location might be tracked and recorded without the user's permission.
"(The users) should decide how to manage and share (that data) on a peer-to-peer basis," Dr. Ratti says.
"In the next weeks a new applet will give full control on the data to the users.
As public wifi connections become more common, so too will the possibility for privacy violations.
It's hard to find a coffee shop anymore without some form of wireless Internet access, often needed to serve an increasingly tech savvy consumer.
Considering the prevalence of online gaming in the console era, these kinds of rights management and anti-piracy/hacking measures may be unavoidable to consumers and tempting to companies.
Xbox Live is now included with every Xbox 360 at the free "Silver" level.
Windows Media 8 was found to record what DVDs are played on your system and transmit that data to Microsoft servers, something not specified in the user agreement at the time.
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