Flashback to simpler times

Just found this old post on Wired from way back when I presented Imity to the world at Where 2.0 in San Jose. Imity was Bluetooth wardriving as social network. We built a social experience around each BTId conceiving of it as a 'location' (a little bit leaning on device class, ideally - speakers probably stay where they are - headsets and phones don't)

It's hard to believe now - but back in 2006 we still thought the internet was a nice friendly place. None of us had any experience with predators of any kind - and as such security was just super far from our minds. I spent a couple of days at a conference explaining this idea and talking to people and exactly zero people mentioned security or privacy to me in conversation. I also did not bring it up even once.

Before the darkness

Hard to believe - but that was how we lived on the internet back in the day. Later it went haywire. There's a great book about this history in which Finn Brunton ingeniously tells the cultural history of the internet by analysing the problem with the internet: Spam.

On the early internet - this was seen as a simple question of bad behaviour - like people being loud without noticing. As the internet grew from a small community of highly connected peers to something bigger - this familiarity disappeared and we got to a point where the admin's couldn't police the internet anymore - and the real Police - laws and law enforcement - took over.

It's not like I didn't write tons of posts about spam back then - before we formed the company, and it's not like installing a firewall on a computer with actual internet access back in 2003 didn't immediately tell you about the hostile internet - but somehow these phenomena seemed remote to the actual online experience - unlike today where they feel ever present.

Wardriving as a social network

Back in 2006 we just thought bluetooth IDs was a fresh way to learn more or less where we were - "At that bar where I usually can see that speaker" - or we'd make a live map of conferences where people could add a name to their Bluetooth Id and make themselves available for conversation. Or we'd simply reverse it and let you know something about the show you were currently at. All without smartphones, GPS or anything else.

These days of course it's all just security risks. Predation is so real that all of these completely legitimate use cases are not really something you'd build a service around.