Re: Location services and age limit Re: Location in the news

On 8/4/10 10:58 AM, John Carr wrote:
> I'd hate to get between you and your cows. I'll check with the Cow
> Liberation Front to see if they have any problems with this, but I surely
> don't.
>
> Seriously, I agree. I guess my point is that the big companies that are
> rolling out these services should behave more responsibly.

Not everyone lives in the same world you do, John. I honestly don't know 
of any predators or pedophiles or nasty people. It's not something I 
think about or every have had to deal with. Hence, it's good that you 
come in and advocate this stuff to us because it's sometimes hard to 
forget some of societies problems.

However, I still think it's a fair question to ask:

1) how much of a real problem is it? What is actually happening (all 
media beat-up aside). I'm not willing to give up civil liberties and 
human rights without absolute proof of problems and actual evidence that 
the solutions being proposed help.

> They should have
> worked all this out.

Yeah, and the Stanley knife people should have worked out that people 
would use those knifes to hijack planes. And that hammer people should 
have worked out that if you hit someone over the head with it, it will 
kill them.

John, for the last time: IT'S A DUMB TOOL! It's exactly like a hammer. 
If people abuse a hammer, then it's a weapon. The hammer is just a 
hammer. The geolocation API is just an API: it just tells one where 
something is.

> That would have been the socially responsible thing to
> do.

It was not designed to go out and hurt people. It just gets the location 
of things.

> The API, as such, is not the primary issue, but can you guys find a way
> out of the dilemma?

There is no dilemma. There is only you making up some bogus hysteria 
about there being some problem which you have continuously fail to 
present any evidence actually exists.

> We shouldn't have to do this but if we do press for laws on this, will the
> big companies fight them? Use their lobbying power and their lawyers to try
> to defeat us or delay things until they have anyway amassed a huge amount of
> location data which they can analyse and use for commercial purposes?

Or should we hand all our details to some big centralized database, so 
we can do age verification... and then that data can also be used for 
commercial purposes (or worst) by governments?

> I'm sorry for banging on about the big companies, but to quote Superman
> "With great power, goes great responsibility".

I thought that was spiderman?

> To their great credit, not
> all big companies are rushing into this  market. Only some of them are.


-- 
Marcos Caceres
Opera Software

Received on Wednesday, 4 August 2010 09:36:23 UTC