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I had an interesting evening tonight. I was at dinner after a BOSPDAUG (Boston PDA Users Group) meeting and the woman sitting next to me was having a problem with BigClock. The countdown timer wasn't getting set when you tapped on the numbers. I couldn't make it work. I see the developer of BigClock, Jens Rupp, on IRC all the time and since I was now curious I told her I'd ask him about the problem. I asked her for her email address to report whatever Jens said. She said she'd enter it in my Palm.
She did enter her address but instead of handing it back to me she proceeded to look through my Palm, trying out different applications and asking me infrequent questions. It was rather dark and she wasn't using the backlight so I couldn't really see what she was doing. My whole body was tense and my brain was focused on ways to get my Palm back without causing a scene. Finally when food started arriving I took the opportunity to get my device back. I told her I'd rather not have my Palm out while there was food on the table and she reluctantly handed it back to me. I breathed a sigh of relief once it was put away. As soon as we were done eating she asked for it back. I didn't want to give it to her but I didn't want to cause a scene either so I eventually gave it to her. I saw her hit the DateBook button and saw she was moving around different launcher tabs. She caused my Palm to crash by launching the digitizer while Eco Config was gathering information on the installed applications. She looked through my checkbook and asked me if it handled the calculations automatically. At that point I asked her to please close my checkbook and I asked her if she was looking for anything specific. I was finally able to get my Palm back a minute or two later when we paid the check and started to disburse. I am still tense and still upset. Quite frankly I feel violated. Much more so than I would have guessed. I knew I disliked people looking at my Palm, but I had no idea just how much this type of exploration would bother me. I can't imagine randomly looking through someone else's checkbook or appointments, or spending that much time randomly poking around. If I use someone else's Palm, I always ask to use it and explicitly ask to use each application I look at. Even if the owner gives me blanket approval to look at whatever I want I avoid anything that might contain personal data such as the built-in applications or a checkbook. If I don't recognize the name of an application I always ask what it is before launching it. Go To Page: 1 2 |
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