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You can ‘sniff’ yourself if you really need to - Facebook goes mobile

by Guy J Kewney | posted on 01 April 2008


You would be silly, if your mobile phone is paid for by your company, to mobile-enable Facebook. As Brian Levin, chief executive officer of Useful Networks, told The Times: "Privacy is paramount and sniffing should only be used by people you can trust."

The "sniffing" referred to is a mobile tracker program. It posts your location to your Facebook page, and the idea of The Social Network Integrated Friend Finder (SNIFF)  is to let your friends find you more easily.

In the UK, the only mobile phone network to be integrated with Facebook is O2, and users mostly restrict themselves to uploading pix. But according to the report by Adam Sherwin, it has potential for allowing your office manager to detect the expensive restaurant you're loitering in, or the hotel room you're "resting" in when you actually said you were meeting a client.

Users can specify who can and can not sniff them, or whether they are open to be sniffed by anyone on the network. The company plans to charge users about 75p for each location "sniff", with the results for mobile customers sent by return text. It will be the first Facebook application to apply premium charges to customers’ mobile bills. The heaviest users in Sweden are wireless-connected members of the social networking site, who have integrated the application into their personal profile page.
But if the company pays the phone bills, it may be hard to block Human Resources...

Here is Useful Networks

This is SNIFF


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