“There’s an app for that”, and this is the mantra that modern day smartphone and tablet proponents continue to tout. However, what if there was an app out there which would be able to inform would-be thieves of the best places when it comes to stealing? That might sound out of this world, but apparently it is not too difficult to pull off, where one would need to gather publicly available data based on disposable income, crime levels and problems that are reported in a district. This points to the optimum place that one can head to, where you target an area of high income, low reported crime and broken streetlights. Thankfully, the existence of this app is for a good reason, as it picked up top spot in the “safety” category at an Amsterdam hackathon some years ago.
The app, known as Makkie Klauwe (which is “easy pickings” in Amsterdam slang) was the brainchild of Bram Fritz, who was a student who had a mind to “provoke discussion on the role of open data in our society”. Thankfully, this app was never released on a large scale, but it pointed to the very real fact that data is a double edged sword, and depending on the motives of the person, it could be used for good as well as bad.
Do you think that companies should be collecting and converging various information together for a good cause? One thing’s for sure, we would still have a mind in making sure that security of the collected data is paramount – at least from the user’s point of view.
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