Comment by burningChrome

I remember back in the early days of wireless data when AT&T had an app you could use on their phone where you logged in and it effectively used the GPS data of people signed in on app to tell you if they were near you or not. They marketed like you were downtown and got some free baseball tickets and needed to find someone to go with you. The app would tell you where your friends were and you could offer them to go over their simple chat app.

It completely bombed out because people were so freaked out about a device knowing where you were.

I also remember when Nextel came out with an enterprise tracking app for delivery companies where you could track the vehicle and make sure it was on time making its deliveries and could alert a person monitoring the software back at the office if say the van was sitting too long somewhere which indicated they had broken down or something similar.

Two companies tried to install on their vans and there was so much push back from so many people in one company, they canceled their order. The other company did install it and then they had three lawsuits from employees who claimed the software was a breach of their privacy - while in the employment of said company and on said companies time. The company voluntarily removed it after only a few months.

Its just so strange to me that we went from not wanting any of this, to just freely handing over any and all private information to these companies.