This one made me laugh. Evidently our State Department is creating an app for cell phones to wipe the phones address book and send out an alert when activated. In the name of helping pro-democracy activists. Really now?
I'll get to the elephant in room in a second, but I don't see the value in this. You can already mine social networking sites easily enough for any data people put on the site and glean information on where they were when they uploaded it. And wiping the phones address book accomplishes just about nothing when dealing with the police who could pull your phone records if they wanted to. Even if the phones data is deleted you can always recover something if you try hard enough, the authorities will know full well you had the app and who you sent it to.
But the biggest issue is, who in their right mind would trust the US government, with it's checkered history of spying on people, to actually supply such a product that isn't a Trojan horse or not to abuse it? The technically savvy would never use such an application or government provided technology to mask their activities, and I'd wager most rubes would know better than to trust it given the source.
I also can't fathom why we'd think supplying foreign nationals the tools to circumvent their own security apparatus is a good idea, and I'm certain our government would not appreciate it one bit if they did that to us. There are far too many ways for this to go horribly wrong.
http://news.yahoo.com/...