Yesterday I attended a conference in Tokyo and one of the subjects included mobile phone applications. While you can generally use a web browser to access a number of useful websites, some of them provide smartphone applications to custom tailor the user interface experience to better fit the small screen sizes. My personal preference is to use the phone's browser instead of cluttering my phone with a bunch of apps that I rarely use. This places me in a specific category of users. The point of the presentation showed how much you can learn about a person based on their smartphone app usage.
The thing that I found interesting about the presentation is how accurate of a picture can be painted about you simply based the smartphone apps you use. Similarly that same information can be gathered from the websites you visit and how you use your computer.
For most of us, this isn't a big deal as we don't really use our computers for nefarious purposes. For others, this is rather bothersome. Fortunately the examples provided in yesterday's presentation were used to categorize users in to various demographic groups for ad sales purposes. However imagine if someone were to use that information to deny insurance benefits or keep you from getting a new job. It leads me to believe that we all need to be rather careful of our digital footprint. After all, someone might discover you have a clinical addiction to chocolate-chip cookies.
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