I had a strange idea the other day and the more I thought about it, the less strange it became. In these days of connected mobile devices which require wireless connectivity to do almost everything, it is all too easy to become complacent about privacy and the amount of personal data we share with online services.
Chances are that you have gigabytes of data stored online including emails, calendar entries, files, photos and media, and lord knows what else. It’s all there swimming in the virtual world and available for anyone who has the know-how and nasty motivations to do something with it. I am sounding paranoid of course because the well-known online services are incredibly secure and the benefits far outweigh the risks. For every three apps you use on a smartphone or tablet, it is likely that two require connectivity to work properly.
Anyway, my idea was a mobile device similar to a PDA, but the size of the smallest Kindle. You would be able to store all of your personal data on it and it would ’never’ connect to the Internet. You could connect it to a desktop to transfer data to it, but the synchronised data would never be available to any other part of the desktop. Your device and the device-data held on your desktop would never go anywhere else, ever. It is a traditional solution that, if done right, would replace a paper notebook, but with search facilities, a colour screen and the ability to hold text, images and any other type of personal media. That is all it would do, but it could also deal with your PIM requirements including contacts, calendars and memos.
Maybe there is a small, but significant market for a completely secure and unconnected mobile device or maybe I am in a dreamworld and imagining something that has no place in 2012. What do you think?
Valid or crazy?
About Shaun McGill
[...] wrote an article recently on the Clove Blog in which I wrote the [...]