ReadWriteWeb

It's almost a decade ago now that the 2002 film Minority Report showed the moral majority what the future will look like in 2054 when mobility, geo-location and targeted content technologies merge. While the movie looks at various elements of the digital future, the biggest 'ah ha' moment for both privacy advocates and marketers alike happens when John Anderton (Tom Cruise) has his retinas scanned as he exists the train and a digital billboard displays "John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right now."

So how long until you walk past a store and it offers the "other people like/bought" experience outside of the confines of a website? Services like AT&T's Shop Alerts show promise by linking customers proximity to stores and offers. But these aren't the "other people like you" recommendations based on behavior that go beyond the proximity to a store you already like (and have already subscribed to).

Flickr will announce a new feature this morning called Geofences, forward- and backward-looking place-specific privacy settings for the location data of the geotagged photos you upload. The feature is live right now and is really well implemented - this is something that every social network ought to enable.

Geofencing is a term typically used to refer to the drawing of a line on a map where some kind of pre-determined action is triggered, it's most established in the business of transporting goods in trucks and triggering tracking actions when those trucks enter into certain geographic zones. Flickr's new privacy geofences are something everyone is likely to enjoy using though. I, for example, have already set up a geofence around my house prohibiting anyone but my approved contacts from seeing the photos I upload from home. Thanks, Flickr! Update: Turns out I got that wrong, the photos are subject to my previous privacy setting - it's just the location of my house that's now more private due to the geofence. That's cool too!

An online petition on Change.org is gathering signatures to pressure Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and National Geographic to update their world maps to include the newly independent country of South Sudan. After 50 years of violent conflict, South Sudan gained independence on July 9th. The new nation has been recognized by the United Nations and the African Union, but these major world maps have not yet been updated.

The petition was launched by John Tanza Mabusu, a South Sudanese man living in Washington, DC. He writes, "As it is now, the world map looks like nothing happened on July 9th, 2011, and the map of Sudan looks like the country is still one... if South Sudan was in the Europe or North America, it would be appearing on the world map by now!"

Now that Libya's Internet is returning, even as that country's rebel forces firm up their possession of its capital, Tripoli, someone has made one small, but elegant gesture, they've renamed a square.

More accurately, they have reversed the name. Renamed "Green Square" by Libyan dictator Moamar Qaddafi, it now shows up on Google Maps under its old name, Martyr's Square.

Martyr's Square was the name of the square in Tripoli before Gaddafi regime renamed it. Google says the name change was made by a user late Sunday night, as rebel forces took over the city. It was approved by Google, meaning it was visible to the public, shortly thereafter.

Google says the square's name has been re-labeled Martyr's Square, though map users can continue to search using either name to find the location.

Google uses a broad range of sources to keep its maps up to date. This includes public and commercial data providers as well as user contributions.

Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc. (IRE), a non-profit organization, has made the 2000 and 2010 U.S. Census data easily available in CSV and JSON formats. From the site census.ire.org you can browse through the census data and export what you need.

You can also find the entire site Github.

Today Foursquare announced that its API now has 10,000 registered developers. That's an impressive number, especially since Facebook and Google were supposed to have killed the service off by now. But what exactly are all those developers doing with the API?

Marshall Kirkpatrick, our resident geolocation buff, asked around our virtual water cooler "Where are the magic results? Where is the TweetDeck of Foursquare? Where is the crazy awesome data analysis?"

Information workers aren't the only ones affected by information technologies. For example, computers aren't the only piece of equipment being remotely monitored by employers anymore. The Wall Street Journal reports that employers are increasingly using tools like GPS and wireless communications technologies to keep tabs on heavy construction equipment, long-haul trucks, delivery vans, buses and police cars.

"Now, they can see who is wasting fuel by idling too much, operating outside their assigned area, working machines too hard or driving too fast." the paper says. The data received from this equipment can be mined for insights into how to increase efficiency. Also, Equipment dealers sometimes arrange to receive the data from machines to help with scheduling routine maintenance.

Today at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, Google announced the opening up and general availability of the Google Places API.

The API, which has been in a closed beta testing and only available for a select number of companies for the past year, gives developers access to Google's database of restaurants, bars, hotels and various other points of interest.

For all the effectiveness and efficiency mobile technology and geolocation offer to marketers, you'd think that traditional, paper-based methods of marketing would be practically extinct by now.

While things may be headed in that direction, we're not quite there yet, according to a recent survey conducted by Quova, a provider of location-based marketing services.

Since data scientists Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden (disclosure: Pete writes for ReadWriteWeb) presented information about how iPhones store a log of your location data in an unencrypted file, there's been a mix of reactions. Some are outraged by the privacy implications. Some don't see why it's a big deal, citing either the forensic community's prior knowledge of the logs or the fact that many people share location information on Foursquare. Others have been intrigued at the possibilities of exploring their own personal location information.