MacSwitching.com > Friendspotting in the MIT campus with iFind and WiFi

How do you meet when you’re at MIT campus?
Imagine you’re using one the many hotspots around and have to meet mates (or professors), you’re supposed to be using already a chat system but…
does it aloow you to locate other users?
Enter iFind from MIT, a Java-based IM (available thus for Win XP and Linux users too).

What is exactly?

iFIND is a location-aware application that puts you on a map of the MIT campus when you start the program. That is, it puts you on your own map of campus, and not other people’s, unless you give them permission.

As usual with MIT, iFind has its roots in a previous project way ahead if its time!

iFIND spawned out of iSPOTS, a project at SENSEable that began in 2005, and concerns over the privacy implications of real-time location data. Our response was to develop an application that would allow users to share location information in real-time, with the ability to start and stop sharing information with any users at any time.

Under the hood, the main features…

Positioning – we don’t have fancy positioning technology beyond what we found from PlaceLab. We just put PlaceLab to good use. Your location is derived from the signals that your laptop’s (for example) wireless card detects in its vicinity. Thanks to the high density of WiFi access points on the MIT campus, the software can compute your location accurately (we’d say within a few meters).

Distributed Data – we spent a long time deliberating over our privacy scheme. Our premise was, suppose some malicious person wanted to stalk some user and seized control of our server somehow (we would never let that happen, but just suppose), they should not be able to find logs of users’ locations. Thus, taking the extreme view of giving users control over their data, we implemented an architecture that does not collect users’ locations centrally. Instead, the only way to see a user’s traces is to get the user’s permission, and be logged on to iFIND at the same time.