Mobile Carriers Employ Round-The-Clock Legal And Tech Teams To Support Massive Increase in Surveillance Requests
The number of requests addressed by the study — the first time law enforcement’s cell surveillance has been studied at a national level — surprised some officials who follow the issue closely.
“I never expected it to be this massive,” Rep. Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who is co-chairman of the Bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, told the Times. “There’s a real danger we’ve already crossed the line.”
Law enforcement requests for information have risen 12 percent to 16 percent for each of the past five years, the Times noted.
AT&T said it now responds to more than 700 request a day, about a third of which do not require court orders or subpoenas, while Sprint said it logged the most requests for information than any carrier last year, reporting a daily average of 1,500 data requests. In order to address all the requests and determine their legality, most carriers reported employing round-the-clock teams of lawyers and technicians, The Times reported.
Smartphones are replacing other possessions including alarm clocks, watches, cameras, diaries and even laptops and TVs as they become more intuitive and easier to use for things beyond calls.
Perhaps indicative of where things are moving, one in twenty smartphone users have switched to use their phone in place of a TV (6%) or reading physical books (6%)
- Over half (54%) say they use their phones in place of an alarm clock
- Almost half (46%) use their smartphone instead of a watch
- Two-in-five (39%) use their phone instead of a dedicated camera
- Over one quarter use their phone instead of a laptop (28%)
- One in ten have gotten ride of a games console in favour of their smartphone (11%)
On April 9, 2012, Web 2.0 lost its mantle as the most important Internet paradigm. We are now starting the Age of Mobile. Google and Facebook’s Internet dominance is no longer guaranteed. They face a threat from below and an army of smartphone-touting masses that sees little distinction between the piece of hardware in their hands and the Internet world it opens up.
![Is the Mobile Marketplace ready for “Virtual Personal Assistants?”
Even if Apple is ready to offer a virtual personal assistant to every iPhone 5 buyer, does that mean every iPhone 5 buyer is ready for a virtual personal assistant? Not if it doesn’t at least outperform Clippy…
Microsoft Word’s Clippy failed for two reasons: he was intrusive, interrupting you when you had already begun a task, and he simply wasn’t very smart, often failing to understand your intentions…
“They had to lobotomize all the machine learning they used, to make it primitive enough to run fast and in real time” says Hong.
Now, though, smart phones are blisteringly fast, and complex processing can be outsourced to the cloud, which means we can fully leverage the fruits of AI research even from relatively simple hardware. What’s more, adds Hong, Siri is crucially “driven by what the user is explicitly asking”—it doesn’t pop up officiously, like that insufferable paper clip.
Winarsky is betting that virtual personal assistants will be ubiquitous, and widely accepted, sooner than many expect…
Winarsky foresees an era when virtual personal assistants offer advice and recommendations on a range of topics. Eventually, he says, the technology will be folded into the desktop and the Web, and it will make people rich. “Within 10 years,” he says, “we will see the value associated with virtual personal assistants throughout our marketplace to be in the many tens of billions—and [it] optimally might reach the 100-billion-dollar level.”
(via Would an iPhone ‘Assistant’ Really Help? - Technology Review)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lp3mykZy4T1qgpcs1o1_500.png)
Is the Mobile Marketplace ready for “Virtual Personal Assistants?”
Even if Apple is ready to offer a virtual personal assistant to every iPhone 5 buyer, does that mean every iPhone 5 buyer is ready for a virtual personal assistant? Not if it doesn’t at least outperform Clippy…
Microsoft Word’s Clippy failed for two reasons: he was intrusive, interrupting you when you had already begun a task, and he simply wasn’t very smart, often failing to understand your intentions…
“They had to lobotomize all the machine learning they used, to make it primitive enough to run fast and in real time” says Hong.
Now, though, smart phones are blisteringly fast, and complex processing can be outsourced to the cloud, which means we can fully leverage the fruits of AI research even from relatively simple hardware. What’s more, adds Hong, Siri is crucially “driven by what the user is explicitly asking”—it doesn’t pop up officiously, like that insufferable paper clip.
Winarsky is betting that virtual personal assistants will be ubiquitous, and widely accepted, sooner than many expect…
Winarsky foresees an era when virtual personal assistants offer advice and recommendations on a range of topics. Eventually, he says, the technology will be folded into the desktop and the Web, and it will make people rich. “Within 10 years,” he says, “we will see the value associated with virtual personal assistants throughout our marketplace to be in the many tens of billions—and [it] optimally might reach the 100-billion-dollar level.”
(via Would an iPhone ‘Assistant’ Really Help? - Technology Review)
