My Good Ideas are Making Others Rich

I have had some good ideas in my time. The biggest problems with my ideas is that they are too technical for me. They are ideas that I don't have the skills to implement but I know that they are good ideas and would be really successful. Let take, for example, a new product by Google. Google recently announced a service called My Location that can locate mobile users of Google Maps without GPS. This is done by using information gathered from the cell tower in which our mobile device is communicating with to calculate your approximate location. This is ingenious and it was an idea that I had years ago.

I thought that I could implement this type of solution on BYU campus and create a person/item/inventory/whatever you want to keep track of locater. I just didn't have the skills to implement it and Google did. So they get all the glory. This has made me contemplate what I can do about the situation. I see two options. One is to try to patent these good ideas and sell them to people who can actually do them. The other option is to do nothing and just enjoy these innovations when they come out. Either way, I feel a little sense of gratification when I see that Google had the same idea I had.

Digital Privacy in the US

I was reading a few articles today about Google and privacy rights. One article was about Google Street View, a technology that shows street level images of buildings, cars and even people, and the privacy issues of doing such a thing in Canada. Apparently the privacy laws in Canada restrict showing faces or license plates on the internet.

After reading this article I wondered why the US is lagging behind in the issue of digital privacy. Another point of view could say that others are overprotective. I don't know which is right but in a world of identity theft and crazy stalkers I would tend to lean towards the lagging behind camp. This article shows us that the US does not protect the right not to be identified online while Canadian laws purely protect that right. The US needs to learn from the Canadian laws of privacy and help protect the privacy and dignity of its citizens.