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I agree. I went to their website and saw how the technology works, and it seems really iffy. The way they recognise that two phones were bumped into each other
by hristov 17y ago
I agree. I went to their website and saw how the technology works, and it seems really iffy. The way they recognise that two phones were bumped into each other is by having each phone contact a central server and having the central server compare the timing of the two events as well as some rough location information.
So this means that you have to send your data through their central servers. Yes, it is encrypted, etc. but I would feel much safer if it were encrypted and sent locally instead.
Also I am sure as it gets popular there will be issues with timing, such as different people bumping at the same time, or the bumps being mistimed, due to differences in the way the wireless networks of two different providers time stamp the various notifications.
So it seems that while the act of bumping may give an impression of security (i.e., that you know for sure who you are sending your data to), this impression is illusory which means you will have to authenticate the recipient anyways, so you might as well use bluetooth.
And as somebody else noted if they devoted the same efforts to bluetooth, I am sure they could make their app just as nice. And they can also use bumping to initiate bluetooth transfer too.
It seems that they are eerily insistent on transferring the data through their servers.
- Tichy 17y agoThat's disappointing, I had expected them to analyze the vibrations of the bump on the two devices. Maybe that would be too much black magic after all.
- sethg 17y agoBluetooth connects devices that are close to each other, but your phone’s Bluetooth driver can’t tell the difference between a device that is touching the phone and a device that is ten feet away. So in order to establish a Bluetooth connection between two devices, they need to go through a mutual authentication handshake before anything else happens. You wouldn’t want some stranger on the bus to accidentally get a message on his phone saying hristov wants to send you $100, right? I think there are some folks at the MIT Media Lab who were experimenting with using touch as a way to establish relationships between devices (e.g., you touch a light-switch panel to a lamp, then stick it anywhere on the wall, and that switch will control the lamp it was bound to), but obviously current cellphone technology doesn’t support that. The alternative to mutual authentication is to have a trusted third party, and that’s what the Bump server provides. Using the server to create the illusion that information has passed from phone to phone by osmosis is, IMHO, a neat hack.
- briancooley 17y agoIt seems that they are eerily insistent on transferring the data through their servers. Judging from their job board, it's because they plan to mine the data. http://bu.mp/jobs#data http://bu.mp/jobs#data
- Luc 17y agoTo give them the benefit of the doubt, I don't think it's the user's transferred data they are talking about: "At Bump we have a diverse collection of data sets: network performance, user behavior, social network data, and many types of handset data [...]"
- jmintz 17y agoWe do not log any information that people exchange. The data job is to better understand usage/users and to improve our matching algorithms. http://bu.mp/privacy http://bu.mp/privacy