$20 MILLION IS SMALL CHANGE FOR APPLE, AND IT'S PROBABLY NOT ALL ABOUT SIMPLE INDOOR GPS.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple has bought the "indoor-GPS" company WifiSlam for $20 million. Apple has acknowledged the deal but won't comment further, but we know that the two-year-old startup has patented technology to enable precise indoor geo-location of a Wi-Fi enabled portable device.
The system works by using crowd-sourced Wi-Fi fingerprints--essentially the map of which wireless network is visible at what strength from a particular place on the planet--and it's precise enough to very accurately locate a user in a particular corridor in a large building. This is a very similar trick to the Wi-Fi and GPS techniques that Apple uses to power its iOS location services, including its traffic reports. Apple got into hot water for this a while ago, partly through an error and partly because users don't understand that it's thanks to anonymous crowd-sourced location data like this that all our smartphones are actually good at GPS.
Speculation is now abounding that this purchase is a play by Apple to super-power its mapping services by including indoor GPS and maps in its location products. Google has been trying a similar trick, also using wireless fingerprints but in this case recorded deliberately, and Microsoft and Nokia have separately been looking at this system for future use.
But the advantages of precise non-GPS-based systems like this go far beyond simple location indoors--as useful as that is likely to be for navigation and so on.
- Navigating Crowded Streeets and Shopping Malls - WifiSlam's system may also be useful in crowded city streets where GPS signals are blocked by buildings, and it will be incredibly useful in locations like shopping malls.
- Precise Location Finding - Integrated with other iOS systems like Siri, WifiSlam's tech could let your phone tell you how to get to a particular store in a mall or even a section in a department store.
- Targeted Location-Based Advertising - Combined with something like Apple's Passbook, it could also allow ultraprecise coupon-based advertising.
And if Apple's future iPhones do include fingerprint systems, then this sort of indoor location precision would create an extremely secure payment system that far surpasses your plastic credit card's usefulness--because the company would be able to precisely ID the account owner and confirm that the phone is in fact in a particular store paying at a particular cash desk. This security solution is in an existing Apple patent for next-gen ATMs.
There are also plenty of other potential implementations, including buddy finding and indoor augmented reality systems--the sort of tech, in fact, that Apple has been patenting for a long time for its standard GPS solutions.
COMMENTARY: When I first learned that The Wall Street Journal had reported that Apple was acquiring WifiSlam, I thought it was just another Wifi service company, but I was wrong. Once I visited WifiSlam's website and learned about their technology, I feel that it is my duty to warn my readers of the potential for privacy invasions on a monumental scale. This acquisition, if it is true and finally consumated, has nothing but sinister implications written all over it. Imagine if I knew where you were, and maybe even knew what you are doing. A jilted girlfriend of wife could track her boyfriend or husband's secret affairs. Good for the girlfriend or wife, but bad for the boyfriend or husband. Or what if your employer tracked your whereabouts or behaviors while at work or on your lunch break or off work? Do you see what I am driving at here?
We have fundamental and legal rights of privacy, and WifiSlam's location-based applications have the potential to uproot and destroy any resemblance of privacy, legal or otherwise. It is an intrusion of our very way of affairs of our daily life. In a recent poll of women, many of them had grave reservations about being tracked by LBS applications, or even worst, being stalked by individuals with malevalent intentions. WifiSlam's LBS applications maybe acceptable to some circles of society, and I won't name any, but it certainly gives chasing women or vice-versa men, new meaning, and even new concerns about our privacy.
I cannot begin to tell you just how dangerous WifiSlam's applications could become through malevalent missuse. I can certainly see the need for tracking dangerous criminals and terrorists, thankfully there are laws on the books that allow this, but tracking an individual for the pure enjoyment and without due process of law, is not only illegal, but could lead to some kingsize lawsuits if iPhones are equipped with anything close to what WifiSlam says on its website about its proucts:
"Allow your smartphone to pinpoint its location (and the location of your friends) in real-time to 2.5m accuracy using only ambient WiFi signals that are already present in buildings.
We are building the next generation of location-based mobile apps that, for the first time, engage with users at the scale that personal interaction actually takes place. Applications range from step-by-step indoor navigation, to product-level retail customer engagement, to proximity-based social networking."
WifiSlam's description of its products sounds to me like a windfall for brand marketers, research firms, pranksters, child molesters, convicted rapists, ex-husbands and ex-wives, jilted boyfriends and girlfriends, and any individual with malevalent intents, who would like to know real-time information about the whereabouts, interests and shopping habits of iPhone (and possibly even Android users, God forbid) users anywhere, and without them knowing about it.
Foursquare, the locaton-based social network, tried to offering its users a mobile app that made it possible for guys to pinpoint the location of nearby women on a map and view their personal data and photographs.
What really raised privacy concerns about the app — unabashedly named Girls Around Me— is that the women it tracked hadn’t opted into the service and weren’t made aware this was going on.
Here’s how it worked. The app took information women made public about their location on Foursquare, paired it with photos and personal details those same women made public on Facebook, and then put it all together on a map to show names and faces of women near a user’s location. Boy, this eerily similar to WifiSLAM doesn't it?
Thankfully, due to an uproar by females over privacy concerns, especially being stalked by strangers, Foursquare took the product off the market.
In closing, WifiSLAM is a company that I definitely intend to track in my blog, and learn everything I possibly can about, because I believe this is the next frontier in location-based mobile tracking apps (it says so in the above product description). Let's just call it what these mobile apps are -- people tracking apps.
Courtesy of an article dated March 24, 2013 appearing in Fast Company and an article dated March 31, 2012 appearing in The Wall Stret Journal
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