Predicted Future Development
There are several trends integrating computers and software into people’s daily lives. One example is traditional media-oriented products which are being integrated into a single device, called media centres. These media centres include the same functionality as conventional television, DVD-players, and stereo equipment, but combined with an Internet connected computer. In a foreseeable future these media centres are anticipated to reach vast consumer impact (CES) (Newman 2006). In this setting, spyware could monitor and surveillance for instance what television channels are being watched, when/why users change channel or what DVD movies users have purchased and watch. This is information that is highly attractive for any advertising or media-oriented corporation to obtain. This presents us with a probable scenario where spyware is tailored towards these new platforms; the technology needed is to a large extent the same as is used in spyware today.
Another interesting area for spyware vendors is the increasing amount of mobile devices being shipped. Distributors of advertisements have already turned their eyes to these devices. So far this development have not utilized the geographic position data stored in these devices. However, during the time of this writing companies are working on GPS-guided ads and coupons destined for mobile phones and hand-held devices (Business 2.0 Magazine). In other words, development of location-based marketing that allow advertising companies to get access to personal geographical data so that they can serve geographically dependent ads and coupons to their customers. Once such geographic data is being harvested and correlated with already accumulated personal information, another privacy barrier has been crossed.
Read more about this topic: Privacy-invasive Software
Famous quotes containing the words predicted, future and/or development:
“Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit;Mnot to be reckoned one character;Mnot to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The future is just as much a condition of the present as is the past. “What shall be and must be is the ground of that which is.””
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)