Forum: General Topics
Forums / General Topics / A forum i once saw on here
| Subject: | A forum i once saw on here | |
Alec 7:40 | Right i was flicking through the past pages of this forum, and one person asked for map showing where TMJ's users were. he then suggested putting a 25 mile tolerance on it. Obviously i hate winging. but i feel this is necessary as well its where we actually are. First off, as Stephan will know i don't live in a well populated area, so chances are you ask 5 people tops one of them at least will know me. and i've used my real name. So there that. second from a maths perspective. Even if if was a 25 mile tolerance, if someone was persistent enough and kept plotting the results of randomness, after enough samples a circle shape will start to form. after that its a case of drawing a triangle in this circle (its points touch the edges) and connecting from the triangles angles to the center of the opposite edge to accurately get the center, of which this randomness has been applied. so yes :) On the other hand though i believe Stephen has a right to this graph if you will. i 'own' or run 2 sites, both of which have advanced statistics collected on every visitor they get, things like ip, host, and browser (and in one case screen res are logged) i wouldn't like not having this, i like being able to track individual visitors through pages on my sites. in the same way, i expect Stephan to look at us from time to time to see where we are and such, so weather or not i like it, i accept, and believe he should have the right too if that makes any sense. So privacy is a concern, as it should be, but please don't ever publish our data. On a last note, my GCSE's have started, so good luck to all, i've got maths paper 1 today (18/5/2009) also Stephan, quick question for you. How do you store our data? i understand by database, but passwords hashed and whatnot? I notice you hold our previous tracks, they must take allot of room, i would have one big table to act as a list of points and contain the owner of that point and the track it belongs too (and of course where it is) and a chksum, how do you do it? Alec sorry for the typo's must go to school no | |
ChrisM 9:39 Location: Phone Model: | Hmm, think that person may have been me... I have to confess that I don't fully understand the point that you are trying to make, but the gist is obviously that you don't want your location details published. Obviously the decision on whether and how to implement this is entirely up to Stephen, but the following occurs to me; I quite agree with the point that nothing should be published that might be able to identify someone unless they had given permission for this data to be shown! I'm sure that it would be fairly simple(and from a data protection point of view, probably essential) to have an option that would allow you to exclude yourself from the map, or maybe three options: Not shown on map. Shown on map as anonymous. Shown on map with username. The default setting would obvioulsy be to not show on the map, so users would have to explicitly give their 'permission' before they would appear on the map. ChrisM PS. Hope your Maths paper went Ok!! | |
Stephen 11:05 Location: Phone Model: | Hi Alec, I haven't yet decided whether to allow the live locations to be made public, but as Chris says, if I do include this then it will be totally optional (and disabled by default). To be honest I don't expect that many people would want to allow this, but it could possibly be useful as an option on the phone that could be easily turned on/off. For example if people are taking part in a group cycle or race, etc, then this could be an easy way to view everyone as a group. At the end of the cycle they'd untick the 'live' option, and would then disappear from the map again. As for anonymizing the data, I would really only be looking to do this for displaying on a very large scale map, eg a map of the world or a continent (or should that be 'small scale' - I can never remember which is which!?), where their locations are displayed to the nearest degree, or half-degree, etc. By doing this the accuracy of the data is hugely reduced, making it essentially impossible to reverse-engineer back to the precise location. The recorded tracks are stored in a MySQL database - as you've guessed there is a main 'trackpoints' table that holds the individual trackpoints, with a trackID column linked to a 'track summary' table, this in turn has a folderID linked to a Folders table, etc...! Cheers, Stephen | |
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