Sniff is a mobile social networking application that is intended to show you the location of any of your friends and family that have signed up to the service.
For 50p a time, users can query the service about a particular friend and receive a text containing the name of their location and a link to an online map.
The service works across all UK networks, which might raise some privacy concerns about how Sniff is using the location data it has acquired access to.
Sniff maintain that the data is used only on the strict understanding that it is not stored or shared with other companies. The service is ‘opt-in’ and it is a simple matter to become ‘invisible’ to other users if you want to drop off the grid for a while.
It’s still a worrying prospect, though. When you signed up for a mobile contract where you aware that your location data was going to be made available to private companies? Shouldn’t the real opt-out here be at the network level - a simple tick box on the website to say that you don’t mind your location being funneled into someone else’s data mine?
0 Responses to “Sniff - mobile social-networked friend location”
Leave a Reply