We Can Tell Where You Live

Meant to say something earlier about the always lovely Danny O'Brien's "keynote" at the OpenTech event on Saturday.

Now I'm a big fan of NTK and its spin-off projects (although I haven't forgiven them for mercilessly pulling the plug on EHA, thus severing the only link I had with Chuffy! and Snark, to whom I'd been talking for about four years and who are now seemingly irretrievably lost down the back of the internet sofa), and I'm a big fan of Steven Johnson-style technosocial claptrap, so I was really looking forward to this talk.

Sadly I was a bit disappointed.

Firstly (and possibly most importantly), what on earth has happened to Danny's accent? Three years in California, and he's started talking like Alicia Silverstone. Which for a geek - or indeed for anyone who wasn't in Beverly Hills 90210 - is *not* a good thing.

Secondly, why did he waste so much time wittering on (in comedic fashion, admittedly) about high-school girls and pointing out the perl script on Madonna's website, and save all the interesting points for the last five minutes?

The last five minutes were great. The point was that we unwittingly leak information about ourselves and other people on the internet, meaning that The Man, stalkers, etc. can piece together our and other people's identity and whereabouts, whether we want him to or not.

One example was a project being done by Prof Roberto Cipolla (trans: Bob Onion) at Cambridge University, who's developed software that can recognise buildings from photographs. The idea is that if you get lost, you can take a picture of a nearby building with your mobile, send it to the database, it recognises the building from the arrangement of horizontal and vertical lines, and texts you back to tell you where you are.

(Don't get all excited now - at the moment this would only work if you're lost in Cambridge city centre).

Of course being the privacy loon/techno-conspiracy theorist that he is, Danny reckons that this software could be used (by The Man, the Four Horsemen of the Mediacalypse, stalkers etc.) to trawl through people's online photo archives, like at Flickr or something, and find out where they've been.

I get the feeling I should be terribly frightened about this, but somehow I'm not. I mean, I really don't mind the Sun finding out that I visited the hinterland of Catalunya (unused teenage bandname of...?) in 2002. And if you're a terrorist, you're not going to take photos of your house and your intended targets and post them on Flickr to share with your terrorist mates, are you? *Are* you?

But what if you're *not* a terrorist - say you're a Brazilian electrician or something - but you happen to have taken some photos of places that might seem like terrorist targets, and you've taken a photo of your house....

Oh, *now* I get it.