Thu 7 Dec 2006 5:42 PM
Hold the Phone
Posted by blaark under Economics , Hesitating , Networks , Politics , Society , TechnologyI’ll sit and write a substantial fresh from my ass unsolicited and uneducated opinion at a later time– sorry for all those breathless in anticipation…
At work someone mentioned a website which can track people through their cell phones… Seemed a little unlikely but then we tried it out and, well I guess it’s not unlikely at all… So there’s yet another piece of information out there in the world about each and every one of us (except me) that can be used to track, evaluate and exploit… Check it out:
phonetrace.org
Not sure about the particulars but don’t use dashes between the segments of your number and include the area code… I think it works for all carriers but again I’m not sure… Also I would suggest using someone else’s number because the site’s free and they gotta be making money somehow… As tasty as the banner ad is it’s probably not quite as lucrative as collecting and selling people’s numbers…
December 11th, 2006 at 9:16 pm
sweet jesus! you shoudda seen what my mate was up to!!! brendan - i can’t believe that you would knowingly throw a curve ball our ways? my search turned up male porn and i’m traumatised - draft your apology well
December 13th, 2006 at 3:23 pm
Obviously I thought a ruse which snagged an entire roomful of people was clever enough to share and I only have you people to share with so there you go… I also was amused by the prospect of seeing how people react… Something that tracks the whereabouts of a person through their cell phone is a sure way to irritate privacy rights advocates and other hippies of their ilk but how do they deal with having gay porn shoved in their faces? Most critics of porn discuss the exploitation of women but very few make mention of men which is typically half of the participants in pornography… People who would complain about the objectification of straight porn probably have a different, more base, reaction to gay porn where their standard criticism of the, eh, product is suddenly invalidated… My theory may be a longshot and secondary to a strong desire to say gotcha but also serves as some slight justification I would offer if I was concerned enough to offer much of any…
December 14th, 2006 at 1:22 am
I’m pretty sure a cloaked link to a shock site, however (relatively) tame, violates some term of blog etiquette. If not, spoiling such a link in the first comment must do so. Maybe it’s a kind of neutralization rxn of lameness here.
December 14th, 2006 at 8:34 am
Actually, this is nothing new. Since people’s use of the internet started becoming more prolific in the mid-nineties, there have been artists (mostly from a video or film background) who have been messing with people’s expectations of what will happen when they access certain links or sites. I wish I still had a list of some of these sites- but I remember one that when you clicked the “enter” button on the site an animation of bouncing computer screens took over the entirety of your monitor and the only way to stop it was to flip the power on your harddrive. Essentially it crashed the computer.
Personnally, I like these things- it’s good to mess with people’s expectations a bit. However, taking someone to a porn site posits other problems- but I imagine that in general it causes people embarrassment more than anything. Of course if you did this at work, you would risk being fired and that seems unfair to cuase such a risk for someone who isn’t actually trying to access porn. As for the gay element of it, I imagine that it brings people’s prejudices to the surfice almost immediately regarding homosexuality.
December 19th, 2006 at 8:23 pm
next time I’m gonna read the comments first, I wonder if this is just a trick of yours to maximise commentary