Yesterday I was sitting in my car, enjoying the daily traffic jam on my commute home, and I was yelling at my radio. Now one might wonder what brings me to do such a rather silly thing as yell at my radio. Well, it was the news of all things. And it once again was news about the evil, evil Google.
They dare to do what Skyhook Wireless has been doing all along – measuring the strength of available wireless networks to determine locations based on that data. It’s something very useful actually. All of my three mobile phones¹ and my MacBooks use that technology – it’s a lot faster than GPS and at least in town areas a lot more precise, too. Isn’t that pretty much great? Not according to Federal Commissioner for Data Protection Peter Schaar, who is “horrified” that Google does the same thing now, too. Now I don’t want to bash Peter Schaar – data protection is an important topic, all in all and I guess being the federal commissioner sort of includes the task to be horrified and “appalled” at any given situation. And even though it might be his job to know stuff like that, it might well be that he has never heard about Skyhook Wireless before.
But that isn’t why I yelled at my radio. It was enough to award all the “appalled” and “horrified” politicians the “Kackn00b of the day” award, but not enough to get me yelling.² What got me yelling was the way the whole situation was presented in the news:

[Google] noted that other companies are saving the location of private wireless networks, too. Companies can make money this way, because the wireless radio frequencies can be used to locate cellphones. And that’s how those companies can specifically place ads on cellphones.

(Not very elegant translation of this.) I didn’t quite get the tone right with the translation and it does look a lot more innocent when it is written down, but on the radio it sounded pretty much as if those companies³ are finding a way to inject ads on cellphones. And yeah, even though the facts are in a way right – the data is being used to locate the cellphones, applications on those cellphones use the location to find geotargeted ads – they were presented in a very ambiguous way. And because the facts are right enough, I start to suspect that it was carefully written that way to further fuel the simmering technophobia.
And now I just sound like a conspiracy theorist, sorry.

1. Please don’t ask me why I have three mobile phones. [↩]
2. I don’t yell much, anyway. And if so, then at inanimate objects like the radio and when no-one is around, like in the car. It’s pretty therapeutic and I often feel better afterwards. You should try it. It’s better to do it in those situations than when people are around, really. You might think you get people to do stuff by yelling at them, but more often than not, people just think you’re an idiot. At least I do. Best way to be stamped an idiot by me: yell. But I digress. What are you doing down here reading the footnotes anyway? You’re supposed to read the article about the evil Google and stuff. Then you should nod your head gravely and think to yourself: “Yes, he has a point. What are those technophobic Kackn00bs thinking?” That’s what I want you to do. Not read stupid footnotes that I just put in so that the article looks longer. [↩]
3. They are evil, too, of course. [↩]