Tuesday 15 January 2008

Pic of the day: Little brother knows best?

We know what you want

I have a PDA which is also a mobile phone. Unfortunately this means it also comes with GPRS, which is too expensive for a poor worker to use except in dire emergency, at least here in Norway. To make sure the thing does not connect itself - as my PDA is prone to spontaneous bursts of activity due to friction - I have set the GPRS service provider to Telenor Mobil, not Netcom which the phone is connected to. That way, if it were to get the urge to roam the Internet, it would be rebuffed. Or so I thought, since I don't have any contract with Telenor Mobil. Surely they don't provide services to people who don't have an account with them?

As you may have guessed by now, they do. I plugged my PDA in to the Vista machine and tried updating Avantgo. Rather than telling me there was a problem with the connection through the laptop, it went online and started downloading things from Telenor Mobil. Wut? I managed to stop it after less than a minute, but it does make me nervous. I wonder if I should switch to a less feature-rich gadget next time.

I vaguely worry that this is the trend of the future. If I grow old (which I still think competes favorably to the alternative), will all of everyday things, all of society be like this? Will the driverless taxi drive me where it thinks I should go, no matter how much I protest that I want to go elsewhere? Will the telephone call the people it thinks I should call to if it believes I have dialed the wrong number? Will the shops deliver goods I haven't ordered?

Hey, I can't avoid mentioning our favorite web shop, Amazon.com. They frequently (like once a week or more) send me personalized offers based on my buying history. These are, by and large, utterly wild. But this is because I use Amazon so much for buying gifts to my friends, who are not necessarily friends of each other if you know what I mean. So this diversity probably utterly overwhelms their system. Their favorite rule seems to be: "Customers who bought X also bought Y". This makes me think that within a few years they will be sending me tissues and hand lotion with my high school anime. Hey, it is not such a long jump from CDJapan.co.jp sending me a big poster I never ordered after I had bought some music from them. At least I did not need to pay extra for it.

Whether I will need to pay extra for downloading from Telenor Mobil remains to be seen, but they are not famous for their charity.