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More Clues About Apple's 'Find My Friends' Mobile Service

Harvey Specter said:
Some hacker is probably going to use this to stalk people
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Sadly I could see that being the case. Worse part is they will not use some security hole or something Apple could patch to stop it from happening. People are just way to free with giving away that infomation publicly and then they get freaked out that people can follow them every where.

I have Google Latitude and on that same token 99% of the time I have it turned off and I do not have any info sent to it. The few times I do use it I am very very selective who even has access to the info. Last time I used it was over a year ago and that was when I was going to visit a girl I was dating so she could keep track of were I was on the road so she could have a good ETA and knew when I was getting close but I leave it turned off.

For me a service like this would never really ever be turned on and I have a feeling that it will be a huge failure in the end since it will be linked only to Apple devices.
 
Isn't this related to the already known twitter integration? Seems obvious to me, they wouldnt use the exact same terms for a competing service.
 
nagromme said:
For your enjoyment, I now present 500 people complaining based on the absurd assumption that this will not be optional :)

And another 100 conspiracy theorists saying that dark powers could use this feature if Apple releases it... even though it would make much more sense for them to use hidden software for that, not a user-facing feature! (P.S. Does your wristwatch have a GPS? Are you sure it doesn’t? If I were a James Bond villain, I'd rather track people using a device nobody pays attention to—not an iPhone that hackers around the world have their microscopes and packet-sniffers aimed at.)

Oh well, I’ll still be happy to have this occasionally when meeting friends at a large event.
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What is a wristwatch?
 
ricardobeat said:
Isn't this related to the already known twitter integration? Seems obvious to me, they wouldnt use the exact same terms for a competing service.
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While that occurred to me first, it seems a heap of services use the 'follower' and 'following' terms now. Dribbble, instagram, etc etc.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5)

This to me sounds more like the "system deep" integration of Twitter into iOS more than a "find my friends" location service just from looking at those few lines of code but then again who knows, I hope they indeed release a find my friends app/service.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; de-de) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

another Ping? the name could be a bit less creepy and stalkerish ^^
 
No wonder this is hidden! In fact after the debacle with storing peoples info and coughing and struggling uneasy thorough court/congressional hearings... I'm surprised that this hasn't been smuggled out to the trash in the dead of night.

Like keeping the information/cache they were told to destroy, you can wrap this up with any amount of tinsel, this is not needed and will Apple's ass if they are not careful
 
arn said:
Apple already offers GPS as a multitasking service.

http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/multitasking.html
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yes this is true, they even have access to all this with out you knowing it


find myfriends would be great if we lived in a crime free world, friends, foes, stalkers, these are not mentioned, how can we avoid hacking stalkers hmmm

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Rodimus Prime said:
Sadly I could see that being the case. Worse part is they will not use some security hole or something Apple could patch to stop it from happening. People are just way to free with giving away that infomation publicly and then they get freaked out that people can follow them every where.
.
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googles location whatever its called where you can actually fake your location to friends, all very funny
 
Noooooo

No wonder this is hidden! In fact after the debacle with storing peoples info and coughing and struggling uneasy thorough court/congressional hearings... I'm surprised that this hasn't been smuggled out to the trash in the dead of night.

Like keeping the information/cache they were told to destroy, you can wrap this up with any amount of tinsel, this is not needed and will Apple's ass if they are not careful
 
"Innovating" again, are we? (Except this time, you wont be able to find anyone not using an iDevice. Heck, you shouldnt even be allowed to befriend them!!).

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JTToft said:
It will be interesting to see how they intend to implement this. If it requires your phone to use its GPS at all times, it's not really usable, as it consumes too much power. They should come up with a system where your phone only activates the GPS when one of your followers wants to find you.
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Like... "invent" push? Many obvious solutions to that problem.

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nagromme said:
For your enjoyment, I now present 500 people complaining based on the absurd assumption that this will not be optional :)

And another 100 conspiracy theorists saying that dark powers could use this feature if Apple releases it... even though it would make much more sense for them to use hidden software for that, not a user-facing feature! (P.S. Does your wristwatch have a GPS? Are you sure it doesn’t? If I were a James Bond villain, I'd rather track people using a device nobody pays attention to—not an iPhone that hackers around the world have their microscopes and packet-sniffers aimed at.)

Oh well, I’ll still be happy to have this occasionally when meeting friends at a large event.
Click to expand...

If i wanted to chart people i would make people share more information about themselves (who they are friends with, what opinions they have, where they go etc.). That way, they are doing the job for me.

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Peace said:
Provided the GPS works well and all your friends have an iPhone this would be great at an outdoor concert venue or a festival..All your friends could find each other and see what everybody wants to do.
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people down-voting this must be the same people that would never go to a festival to begin with. i see few real world applications where this is really needed, but this is one of them.
 
divinox said:
"Innovating" again, are we? (Except this time, you wont be able to find anyone not using an iDevice. Heck, you shouldnt even be allowed to befriend them!!).

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Like... "invent" push? Many obvious solutions to that problem.

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If i wanted to chart people i would make people share more information about themselves (who they are friends with, what opinions they have, where they go etc.). That way, they are doing the job for me.

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people down-voting this must be the same people that would never go to a festival to begin with. i see few real world applications where this is really needed, but this is one of them.
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I also agree. Find someone lost in the airport for example.
 
Žalgiris said:
I also agree. Find someone lost in the airport for example.
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Yeah. Basically you'd want it for situations where two people are in for them unfamiliar environments or "on the run" (if i am static, and know where i am it is just as easy for me to take over your device (and your location) and show you the way to reach me (by simply dragging your route)).
 
JTToft said:
It will be interesting to see how they intend to implement this. If it requires your phone to use its GPS at all times, it's not really usable, as it consumes too much power. They should come up with a system where your phone only activates the GPS when one of your followers wants to find you.
Click to expand...

You mean like using the WiFi-location based map they built for you for the last two years without you knowing it? You know, the one where they tracked your phone just like Google did?

They could also easily use cell tower triangulation (this is what my Android phone must do all the times when I occasionally open Google Maps but have WiFi and GPS off). Actually that is pretty accurate.

And I also leave Google Latitude off by default. I also refuse taking photos with my mobile's camera, because I don't like the geotagging of it.
 
Rodimus Prime said:
I would assume it is optional and you could turn it off.

But personally I would say oh look yet another idea in iOS 5 that Apple stole from Google (latitude)
"Year of the copycats" Apple really was talking about itself there. Just another item to add to the growing list.
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Didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that this sort of thing was possible and would be implemented. Heck... it was one of the Apps I thought about in my little wish list since Apps were announced. So, I throw this into the cool but an obvious features.

I think this sort of thing could be very cool. Many cool applications to be able to find your friends.
 
Popeye206 said:
Didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that this sort of thing was possible and would be implemented. Heck... it was one of the Apps I thought about in my little wish list since Apps were announced. So, I throw this into the cool but an obvious features.

I think this sort of thing could be very cool. Many cool applications to be able to find your friends.
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while that may be true and would be valid argument if it was one of the few features in iOS 5 that was not a copy of something else. So far iOS 5 has brought really nothing new to the table and more of a copy from everyone else.
 
swagi said:
And I also leave Google Latitude off by default. I also refuse taking photos with my mobile's camera, because I don't like the geotagging of it.
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You do know that there is a switch (labeled "Camera") within "Location Services" (within the Settings app) for turning off geotagging of photos. Well, at least you know now. I have played with this setting and verified that it does not tag photos with location data when it is off.
 
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