The Find my iPhone app was a godsend yesterday. I was dumb enough to misplace my iPad at a busy trainstation. A quick remote message containing my mobile number and a very welcome phone call later I was reunited with my mobile mind-extender. This totally proves that MobileMe is worth it: find your $600 device anytime anywhere for $99 a year including email, dropbox & website. Thank you Apple. Now I'm hoping the rumored free MobileMe1 is on it's way, but I'll never be a grouch about the yearly fee again.
Meanwhile my traveling companion was flabbergasted at the quick and easy localisation, remote locking and messaging functionality of my iPhone and iPad combo. When I explained it works from any internet connected device with half a browser his esteem of Apple Inc. increased dramatically (it had taken a severe hit previously when his expectation of remote desktop trough Apple TV wasn't quite met by his new and expensive hardware). However we did note that it was a little scary.
In my work experience I've come across car tracking systems that were expensive and inelegant combinations of bricks installed in a car and a server-side application that ate more resources than the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. And here I was saved by a nice little consumer doodad doing the same thing fast & cheap, thanks to Apple's nephology.
The knowledge that some computer somewhere knows where I am at all times because I carry a cellphone is a fact of life. The scary part is encountering spooky reality of watching your gadget move trough a train station, live, on a Google map. While I might benefit from this functionality, I have no control over it's use. Sure, I have control over when I use the MobileMe service, but that's merely something built on top of a gadget that is location-aware and has an internet connection. What else is done with those features is beyond my ken. Maybe Apple is profiling me. Maybe T-Mobile is. Either way, there's not much I can do about it.
The social networks are eager to tap in to your mobile device to record the when & where in meatspace associated with your online activities. Twitter, Foursquare, Loopt and of course facebook Places all use your mobile device's location to provide the world a blow-by-blow account of your wheelings and dealings. Transparency 101: Do not skip your work/school/date and use any of these services! Full disclosure is already taken care of courtesy of your free user accounts at social networks. To qoute Google's Eric Schmidt "But with the mobile phone you could just ask. You could measure everything. And you might be surprised at to what people actually do versus what they say they do—one of the first rules of the Internet."2
Again I can only conclude that the possibilities offered by today's technology come with a price: secrecy. It's great that the advantages of the digital world include a bias in favor of honest people, as long as the people in charge of Minitrue are keeping it equally real. As soon as governments and/or corporations are turning 3v1l on us we are, to put it plainly, pretty screwed.
UPDATE: Apple made the Find my iPhone service free for iPad, iPhone 4 owners3
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