Data Mining

Since I mentioned the profile stickers before I felt like a had to at least address those, so, here is the Aka-Aki profile stuff.

Profiles are basically like any old social platform, you enter your personal data and it goes into the magical black box. Nonetheless, their approach of not displaying real names and only using them for search results is commendable, especially in light of the competition. While it's a decent approach, it's hardly sufficient.

Extra Credit Opportunity: Write a parser that takes a long list of first names and last names and run them each through the search field, cross-reference and create a reverse-lookup table and put it on BitTorrent. (Disclaimer: No, don't actually do it!)

Apart from that minor problem the profiles let you list your preferences in many different categories and you set those values through “stickers.”

When you upload a sticker, you basically create a group centered around an image with a specific title and decide to either let people join freely or only with the approval of a group owner. The stickers become a problem when you actually want to upload one. On the form it states that by uploading you basically agree to hold all rights to the image including copyright, trademark, etc or have explicit permission from the owner.

A CC licensed work could probably be construed to be an explicit permission for most cases but apart from that, permission to that degree becomes difficult. For example, the FreeBSD name and logo are trademarked and explicit permission from the FreeBSD Foundation would be necessary to start a user group on this network for it. This is not to say that asking for it would not be an option but it complicates the issue.

Now, looking at the list of stickers available, the majority of users are clearly violating the terms of use and while it's understandable that the company wants to indemnify itself against potential claims of rightsholders their terms of use seem more of a suggestion than a rule.

It should give the users pause because this company is (and most of the users are, too, important for the principle of causer) based in a country without laws for free of charge take-down notices (one of the very few things that's good about the DMCA). So I wouldn't be surprised if one of them got a take-down notice someday with a hefty bill attached.

(Disclaimer: None of this is in any way legal advice.)

----
Update:
Apparently, getting sued for using stickers/icons and similar low quality versions of copyrighted content did happen to a member of a poker site recently.

Sounds like a cult, probably isn't. It actually is a relatively recent social network that is slowly growing in the germanophone regions. It's probably not the next Facebook but an interesting one, nonetheless.

The primary idea is that you run an app on your phone that uses your Bluetooth transceiver and your data connection all the time (thus you need a volume based data plan). Once the app runs, you are online and the actual data transferred isn't too much of a problem when you turn images off.

Of course you can also use Aka-Aki from your browser and for some things it's even preferable, but the novel things happen with the phone app. For one, it's simply amusing to linger at a busy intersection and see all the TomToms appear and vanish and for every 20 "unknown" Bluetooth devices there often is at least one device with a name that makes you chuckle and wonder whom it could belong to.

Now, apart from all that, why does it do it? Simple, the Bluetooth MAC address is used as a unique identifier that gets associated with a profile. When you come near a person with an address linked to a profile you see it in your discovery list and can view the details. If two people have a sticker in common (stickers are like groups with a picture, expect a separate post) the phone will make a ruckus and alert you to the kinship in proximity.

I can't say whether that is desirable or not since I currently occupy a region with a limited number of Aka-Aki users but I was quite surprised when I looked at my phone one day when playing around with it and noticing that an "unknown" had come in contact last time with a different user months ago and was still associated with this user.

This begs the question whether somebody actually gives implicit agreement of having his or her unique identifier recorded and cross-referenced without ever giving consent to the service or even knowing about the service. From simply recording the unique ID without further information it seems difficult to invoke data privacy protection laws but their new version might change this.

Version 0.8.9
With this version Aka-Aki introduced a new feature last week that makes it now possible to see everybody who is in the same general area with a compatible phone. This is probably the same trick Google Maps uses to pinpoint your position to within a mile, namely the cell information from the GSM/UMTS connection.

When one now looks at the case of tracking identifiers of third parties, privacy protection might well be a problem since reasonably close estimates of position become possible through cross-reference and an opt-in measure seems more and more necessary.

Still, apart from all the complications, dangers and threats, it's still fun to play around with. Just make sure you're nowhere near the Palins, the mascot is a moose!