Robot na automatically nagfi-fire ng airsoft, similar concept ng sa iyo, pagkakaiba nga lang, video cam ndi baril =)

First of all let me say i feel honored that the Nokia Chat Product Manager actually posted a comment on my blog! And secondly let me say it again that i do believe Nokia Chat is great!

Actually what I mean to say is Nokia Chat is an innovative idea and a proof that the convergence of technologies like GPS, mobile internet, chat, online maps is now truly possible.

It is this convergence that both worries and excites me. Nokia Chat is one perfect example of this convergence, but as the technologies around this starts to mature, i’m guessing more and more application developers would take advantage of this new convergence and write their own versions of software.

I agree, Nokia Chat has been written with security in mind… but will other software developers have the same approach? hmmm…

Thanks for the encouraging feedback about the great potential in the Nokia Chat value promise.

However, reading your article I got the impression that there would be a potential security problem related to the Nokia Chat location features. This is something I want to correct right way, so that people won’t get the wrong idea of what you can do with our application. Also I want to make it very clear that it does not contain any security issues related to location or other aspects of your personal security.

To start with, I’d like to explain a bit of what our application is actually able to do in terms of location (in addition to the standard instant messaging features). In Nokia Chat - we’ve got two ways to share your location with your friends. You can do it either by sending your current location or by broadcasting the place name you’re in.

First one of the features - send location - enables you to send your current location in coordinates to a friend you’re chatting with (location is retrieved from GPS or Cell, depending if you have the Maps 2.0 installed or not). By sending your location you can enable your friend to use your current location i.e. by showing it on the map or even by navigate to the place you currently are using Nokia Maps. This is not an automatic operation - we were very explicit when designing the product about the fact that we didn’t want it to be an automated operation. Thus, no location gets shared unless you explicitly send it to your friend yourself. If you do manually send your location, it is sent to the person you want to send it - no other person sees your location. Furthermore, in order for you to be able to send your location (or instant messages, for that matter) to anybody, that other person needs to be in your friend list (i.e. that means both you and the other person have agreed to be friends using the friend invitation procedure inbuilt to Nokia Chat).

The second location related feature we’ve built to Nokia Chat is what we call landmark broadcasting. In this feature, you can utilize the locations that you’ve stored in your device using Nokia Maps or Landmarks application as a part of your status message. Note that you define what the names of these places are (saving places that say “home”, “work”, “shopping”, etc. gives more meaning to the locations, don’t they?). Broadcasting the places is also fully in your control. In the Nokia chat, there are settings which allow you to configure whether any of the saved locations get automatically broadcasted or not. Broadcasting of the place name is done when you are close enough to that particular place. In the settings you also define one-by-one that which of your saved place names get to be broadcasted. By default none of your saved place names are broadcasted. Note that no coordinates of where you currently are gets shared in this feature - only the name of the saved location you’re near is sent out to your friends (and only to your friends). When you want to prepare for chance meetings you do not need exact pin-pointing of your friends’ location within meters. Most often the place name is all you need to say to your friends for them to understand where you are, right? We believe that sharing your location automatically this way (using the place names you control and name, and not your exact location) makes the communication between you and your friends more secure and meaningful.

We believe very strongly in the added value of being able to communicate your location with your friends - but even more firmly we think that the user must be able to fully control all aspects of his or her personal security (especially private data such as location). Simply put, in Nokia Chat you control whether you share these details of your life or not, and how you share them.

I hope this helps to understand that indeed the Nokia Chat is safe to use. So, is it scary? No! Is it exciting? Yes!

Best regards,

Kristian Luoma
Product Manager