android – Data Science, Data Analytics and Machine Learning Consulting in Koblenz Germany

Smartphones of Policemen could give criminals a competitive advantage

Rene — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 09:31:43 +0000

If I were a criminal I would create a smart phone app which would give me the possability to geographically and socially track policemen. Here some background on this thought.
Yesterday I was sitting in the German summit on “Facebook Goolgle & Co – Chances and Risks” (which I will blog about soon) But today during my train trip to the second day of the summit I was sitting in the train talking to a very friendly police officer. He agreed with what was said on the summit. The police is using social networks to find potential criminals. They also use cellphone tracking together with mobile providers to find people they are looking for. Nothing new and special so far. But now my interesting observation.
The police officer proudly told me that he is not using any social networking service because he enjoys his life in privacy. I understood that he believed this to be necessary in his job. By telling me this he was holding his iPhone in his hand. Again this shows one of the most crucial parts in this entire privacy discussion. Even highly educated people often lack an understanding of how much private information they implicitly give to third parties.
So I asked him if he used it during work times and he told me that he did since only mobile providers would know where he is and they could not give away data that easily. I was amazed! A policeman using an iPhone during work. That is such a security lack. If I were a terrorist organization I would create an iPhone and android app (or if possible an open mobile html5 app like Tim Berners Lee suggests <– you see the ethics overwhelm I am just not a criminal (-:). I would design this app in a way to support policemen. Help them communicate or have a cool map integration anything that was useful for the police. In this way I would create a database with real movement data of policemen. This data I could use for a different service similar to http://girlsaround.me/ displaying the current position and face of policemen (including if requested a list of people they recently communicated with including their phone numbers) on a map to anyone of my terrorist organization. The police just could never catch me since I would always know where they are (without asking any mobile provider!) I could even give them fake phone calls pretending I am one of the people they recently communicated with inputting them false information or just distracting them.

Of course this setting is only half realistic:

Every policeman would have to have a smartphone and use it during work time
Every policeman would have to install the app of the criminal
The criminal can distinguish between policemen and other people using the app (should be possible with data mining)
The criminal can decide weather the policeman is currently working or in leisure time

But it should show and demonstrate the dangers…

To conclude:

We have to disallow policemen to use private smart phones during work! Or if they do so they must not install any applications from a source they don’t trust. And here is the crucial point. Who to trust and who not? Trust usually is created through social ties. So if the app is there and some policemen like the service and recommend it to their coworkers trust is created. Who does really ask about the source of an app and about who is running/owning the data servers. A service that is well known on the web can easily run by 2 or 3 people and even if they are nice it is easy to manipulate or blackmail them in order to get access to these very sensitive data.
And on another more technical topic: We need a decentralized mobile space. There has to be a frequency on which people are able to set up their own transmitters and create decentralized mobile networks. It is a shame that those frequencies are all owned by companies creating centralized services.
By the way this would be a good solution since it would also enable the police to have their own decentralized mobile networks giving them privacy against third parties!

Disclaimer:

I never thought I would write an article in this paranoid way telling people what is possible and where the risks are. I almost feel like a member of ccc, anonymous or finally like a real pirate. But one year of PhD in a very data driven environment having social networks, information retrieval and the web as a focus really makes me understand more and more what is possible (in particular easy to achieve). Also the low awareness of society about these dangers (probably due to the complex technologies) overwhelms me and makes me feel like I have to act and at least inform people.
To bad that mostly people who are already aware of these topics read my blog. Maybe I have to go geek and create this app to demonstrate the functionality in order to really rise awareness. There are just too many interesting things to do during a PhD program so I think this time only writing about this has to be sufficient.

Paul Wagner and Till Speicher won State Competition "Jugend Forscht Hessen" and best Project award using neo4j

Rene — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:18:38 +0000

6 months of hard coding and supervising by me are over and end with a huge success! After analyzing 80 GB of Google ngrams data Paul and Till put them to a neo4j graph data base in order to make predictions for fast scentence completion. Today was the award ceremony and the two students from Darmstadt and Saarbrücken (respectivly) won the first place. Additionally the received the “beste schöpferische Arbeit” award. Which is the award for the best project in the entire competition (over all disciplines).
With their technology and the almost finnished android app typing will be revolutionized! While typing a scentence they are able to predict the next word with a recall of 67% creating a huge additional vallue for today’s smartphones.
So stay tuned of the upcomming news and the federal competition on May in Erfurt.
Have a look at their website where you can find the (still) German Documentation. As well as the source code and a demo (which I also include here (use tab completion (-: as in unix bash)
Right now it only works for German Language – since only German data was processed – so try sentences like

“Warum ist die Banane krumm” (where the rare word krumm is correctly predicted due to the relation of the famous question why is the banana curved?
“Das kann ich doch auch” (I am also able to do that)
“geht wirklich nur deutsche Sprache ?” (Is really only German language possible?)

Google 2011 Q4 Earnings

Rene — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:04:30 +0000

Ok no secret here that I am a Google Fan. But listening to the Google Report of 2011 I am just amazed and speechless.
Everything is growing:

$10 bn revenue / quartal ==> more than $100 mio. / day!!!
90 Mio Google+ users
over 60% of plus users engage daily with it and over 80% weekly!
350 Mio active Gmail users
Youtube makes $5 bn revenue
700’000 android devices installed daily
250 Mio. Android devices in total!
11 bn downloads from the android market
chrome is growing (sadly no numbers) But in an interesting (on its own) blog post of reddit you can see 42% of reddit users use chrome (which might not be representative)
Google apps has 5000 new businesses signing up per day (among them: harvard, berkley, states (like wyoming), and a major bank bbva >100’000 employees) ,…)
1 mio. Google+ pages have been created by brands (it is mentioned that there exists a sales team (I knew it all the time (-: )

Larry points out again:
Like I always said: “Emerging highest quality products can generate huge new businesses for Google on the long term. Just like search. And we have a ton of experience monetizing those products over time!”
But have a look for yourself and listen to the annual report!

First privacy impressions of my new android phone

Rene — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 17:29:44 +0000

My new cellphone finally arrived today. Being a fan of Google products, I was excited to test Android and get a feeling for everything. I wasn’t sure whether I would really need a smartphone or whether it was rather a time wasting but cool toy. After a bit of testing and playing around, I have to admit that I will probably use the option to retrieve feeds and read more news / blogs while being on the train or bus. I might also work on my Chinese more frequently with Anki for Android and there are some other features that will most certainly enrich my life.
One of them was that Google offered to synchronize my Gmail address book + calender with Android. The data is with Google anyway so I decided that it is not a big deal. And voilà, all my contacts, including phone numbers, are on my new phone. Amazing, considering my heart attack after my old cell broke down for which I did not have any backups.

All this comes at a very high price.

Since I started blogging and working on my PhD, I also started to use Twitter. So I wanted to download a Twitter app from the Android app market. It is incredible that the official Twitter app asks permission to access my phone’s address book. Remember, my phones address book is just a copy of my Gmail address book. I see how it helps Twitter to increase their service but to me, it became just too easy to share very sensitive data with companies that you might not (?) trust. I wonder whether the service Twitter offers to us will really improve that much if we share our private address book with the company. In my opinion, the small improvement we get does not justify their need to access my private address book. What would I have to promise someone to have a copy of his address book?

Can I escape?

I decided not to install the Twitter app. But does that really make sense? I guess most people don’t mind. After all, it is Twitter, a well known brand, that asks for the data. Additionally, Twitter is a communication service, so it makes sense to share this kind of data. However, even if I don’t share, Twitter can still guess the entries of my address book. Most of my friends who use Twitter with an android phone will probably accept the terms and condition of the Twitter app. Does not installing the app really help to protect my and my friends(!) privacy?
It is amazing that I am thinking right now about the consequences of blogging my experience of interviewing with Google when exactly this company creates structures that make us all sit in a glass house! I am very sure that this is intentionally like this. Please don’t missunderstand me. My first impression of Android is very good and I knew before that it encourages you in several ways to share data with anyone. Still, Android is probably one of the most useful tools which were brought to customers within the last ten years. I am only pointing out that things are changing very fast these days.

Which Android apps do I need?

So far I have:

Google Maps
Gmail
Google Search
Google Voice Recognition
Google Reader
Google News
Tweetdeck (without sharing my address book !)
Ankidroid
Google Docs
Google Calendar

What else would you suggest? And no, I don’t want a Facebook app. (-: