NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Wacky app of the week: DriveMeCrazy "driver snitch" iPhone app
Wacky app of the week: DriveMeCrazy "driver snitch" iPhone app http://bit.ly/hvvCc1 (DriveMeCrazy) OK, here's the drill. This iPhone app lets you play "driver snitch" by injecting into a database the unconfirmed and unverifiable claims of "bad driving" that you see -- which the site operator claims can be searched (via license plate numbers) by DMVs, police, insurance companies, and ... others. What's more, they promise to send the data to DMVs on a regular basis (though they admit they have no idea what gets done with this data -- presumably we all can guess how useful such, uh ... "high quality" data would be). And of course they also promise to hide the identity of anyone who submits "bad driver reports" data into their system. So the data is not only unconfirmed and unverified, but unattributed as well. Obviously, the spoofing potential of this setup is immense -- fun with license plate numbers! But the risks overall seem relatively low, since any entity willing to trust such data as other than a source of not very pseudo-random alphanumeric character sequences would be foolish beyond measure. But these days I consider any app or site that can make me chuckle to have some amusement value at least -- and DriveMeCrazy certainly qualifies on that score. Oh, one warning. The actual site is in the rather esoteric ".mobi" top level domain. Don't confuse it with the ".com" site of the same name -- they sell sex toys. Yeah! Drive me crazy! Oops. --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org Founder: - Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org - Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance: http://www.gctip.org - PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein Google Buzz: http://bit.ly/lauren-buzz Quora: http://www.quora.com/Lauren-Weinstein Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com