Basically, if you can be observed by a person, then you can definitely be "tracked" by a computer.
The thing is, I've never been that upset about this. Technology has only made something that was possible into something that's now feasible, namely observing the public actions of many people to determine what they're doing.
I've always known, even as a kid, that if we scattered many small detecting devices (cameras, microphones, RFID tags) throughout the world, something that is not illegal or bad in and of itself, that we'd pretty much all be track-able.
Did no one think that putting RFID chips all over the place might make a rough point cloud out of nearly everything in the world? Or that simply by interacting with any computerized system it's possible it can be tracking literally ever bit of your interaction with it? Or that it's possible to make cameras so ubiquitous as to make most of the world monitor-able?
Seriously, did the world not see this coming? I know one of the first things I thought of when I saw lots of security cameras somewhere like the airport as a kid was "I bet you could design something to track all the people in this airport using those cameras. That would be sooo cool."
Yeah, most people did not. I know, I have been saying this for years... ever since I studied ipv6 in the olden days (the 90's). All but one or two people I ever discussed the "trackability of everything" with was like, "What the hell are you tripping on?"
The point is that everyone is a target. For a mugger, an ex lover, a political opponent, a boss, an employee... everyone is a target. That should (IMO) make everyone at least a little wary.
It's the exponential reduction in the resources required to accomplish visibility in public actions which is "new". Sure, you could pay someone to follow another person around in public. Now you don't have to, everyone's followed already. The availability of ALPR data to whoever wants to know the last location of a car was one of the more interesting things in the DEFCON presentations around this.
The thing is, I've never been that upset about this. Technology has only made something that was possible into something that's now feasible, namely observing the public actions of many people to determine what they're doing.
I've always known, even as a kid, that if we scattered many small detecting devices (cameras, microphones, RFID tags) throughout the world, something that is not illegal or bad in and of itself, that we'd pretty much all be track-able.
Did no one think that putting RFID chips all over the place might make a rough point cloud out of nearly everything in the world? Or that simply by interacting with any computerized system it's possible it can be tracking literally ever bit of your interaction with it? Or that it's possible to make cameras so ubiquitous as to make most of the world monitor-able?
Seriously, did the world not see this coming? I know one of the first things I thought of when I saw lots of security cameras somewhere like the airport as a kid was "I bet you could design something to track all the people in this airport using those cameras. That would be sooo cool."