What If Your Friends Could Google for Data on Your Mobile Devices?

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008389.html' target='_blank'>http://www.russellbeattie.com/noteb...ok/1008389.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"I think from what I've seen so far, most people have looked at mobile search as a way of finding the stuff 'out there' from my phone, a.k.a. 'anywhere'. But I think as the iPod shows us, more and more people are carrying around with them gigs of data, much of which could be publicly available. Why? I'm not sure just yet, since obviously your iPod isn't like your Web Server, but it could be. Here let me be more concrete, if I've got a 1GB memory card in my mobile phone and most of that filled with messages and media, well there's no reason why that stuff can't be found by a web search, no?"</i><br /><br />Russell Beattie goes on to ask some interesting questions that left me wondering just how feasible and just how soon such scenarios could come to fruition. In my own company, I've been tasked with helping to devise an enterprise collaboration strategy and I see a lot of parallels to consider. While the obvious concerns for everyone are privacy and security, I couldn't help but also wonder about other challenges as well including indexing, metadata creation &amp; classification, user &amp; buddy security profiles, and an overall user management process. On the other hand, at the pace in which P2P technologies have grown and with the vast upside of potential information still left to be shared, maybe it's not such a stretch. What do you guys think?

[Pat Logsdon]

Yeah, I don't think I'd like that very much. As I see it, the lack of implementation of this sort of technology is all that stands between the world and the contents of Scott Baio's cellphone. :mrgreen:

Seriously, I don't think that most people are going to be interested in this sort of data mining. The security implications are also rather serious - I'm sure companies would crack down even more severely on electronic devices if they could be accessed in this way. Making "corporate" information available company-wide at that level of granularity is a legitimate pursuit, but making it possible for private data to become available is a bit scary. I see parallels to unsecured WiFi hotspots here...

[surur]

How is this different from Napster? I understand if you search kazaa you can get plenty of resumes, tax returns, personal photos and the other content of clueless people's hard drive.

Its a stupid suggestion.

Surur

[Pat Logsdon]

How is this different from Napster? I understand if you search kazaa you can get plenty of resumes, tax returns, personal photos and the other content of clueless people's hard drive.

Its a stupid suggestion.
I disagree. Indexing data on mobile devices is a bit different from indexing content on desktop machines, if only because it's not typically done at the moment. As devices become more connected and storage space and bandwidth increases, this could easily become an issue. I honestly don't think it would be a HUGE issue, but I can certainly see how it could cause problems.

[Phillip Dyson]

I remember back in early 2001 one of my fellow co-workers installed a tiny webserver. I wrote another program to allow him to serve up his address book.

One of our web developers eyes popped out of his head as he mentally sorted through the potential.

All the guy had to do was give us his ip address and he would pull it up on our desktops.

Who needs hosting companies. Serve up your personal webpage from your pocket. :)

[Kowalski]

only one word: stupid!
we are always talking about how wireless connection eats our batteries, we all have security concerns, and some of us pay for every kb they use.
the idea is far from beeing usefull, i dont think that people will use this service

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

only one word: stupid!
we are always talking about how wireless connection eats our batteries, we all have security concerns, and some of us pay for every kb they use.
the idea is far from beeing usefull, i dont think that people will use this service
I certainly am not interested in providing this kind of access to other folks off my devices either, but then again, I've never been too keen on the current P2P services available for the PC. In fact, aside from some dabbling with Napster way back in the day, I've simply never used them. But if you look at the responses Russell Beattie has received, it seems that there is quite a bit of interest in what he's proposing.

[Ekkie Tepsupornchai]

How is this different from Napster? I understand if you search kazaa you can get plenty of resumes, tax returns, personal photos and the other content of clueless people's hard drive.

Its a stupid suggestion.
I disagree. Indexing data on mobile devices is a bit different from indexing content on desktop machines, if only because it's not typically done at the moment. As devices become more connected and storage space and bandwidth increases, this could easily become an issue. I honestly don't think it would be a HUGE issue, but I can certainly see how it could cause problems.
Exactly. For PCs, we're dealing with a platform where 99% of the world is using the same OS platform with a host of supported development tools where you can write one client program to be compatible with nearly all PCs in the world. With mobile devices, there is no common platform, especially in the scope of which Russell Beattie was talking about (cameras, phones, PDAs, etc.), though one could try to address at least a couple of platforms by targeting WinCE or PalmOS I suppose.

Now if we really expect this to be usable and we really care about privacy and security, there would also have to be a user management process that easy enough for everyone to adopt, yet powerful enough to allow the user to classify different levels of public exposure depending on the file. I don't think that's a simple task just yet considering the scope of devices involved.