The 24 ways we're tracked on a regular basis reveal something disturbing about the future
The 24 ways we're tracked on a regular basis reveal
something disturbing about the future
Kevin Kelly, "The Inevitable", Contributor
Jun. 28, 2016, 10:53 AM
The design of the internet of everything, and the nature
of the cloud that it floats in, is to track data. The 34 billion
internet-enabled devices we expect to add to the cloud in the next five years
are built to stream data. And the cloud is built to keep the data. Anything
touching this cloud that is able to be tracked will be tracked.
Recently, with the help of researcher Camille Hartsell, I
rounded up all the devices and systems in the U.S. that routinely track us. The
key word is "routinely." I am leaving off this list the nonroutine
tracking performed illegally by hackers, criminals, and cyberarmies. I also
skip over the capabilities of the governmental agencies to track specific
targets when and how they want to. (Governments' ability to track is proportional
to their budgets.)
This list, instead, tallies the kind of tracking an
average person might encounter on an ordinary day in the United States. Each
example has been sourced officially or from a major publication.
·
Car movements — Every car since 2006 contains a
chip that records your speed, braking, turns, mileage, accidents whenever you
start your car.
·
Highway traffic — Cameras on poles and sensors
buried in highway record the location of cars by license plates and fast-track
badges. Seventy million plates are recorded each month.
·
Ride-share taxis — Uber, Lyft, and other
decentralized rides record your trips.
·
Long-distance travel — Your travel itinerary for
air flights and trains is recorded.
·
Drone surveillance — Along U.S. borders,
Predator drones monitor and record outdoor activities.
·
Postal mail — The exterior of every piece of
paper mail you send or receive is scanned and digitized.
·
Utilities — Your power and water usage patterns
are kept by utilities. (Garbage is not
cataloged, yet.)
·
Cell phone location and call logs — Where, when,
and who you call (meta- data) is stored for months. Some phone carriers
routinely store the contents of calls and messages for days to years.
·
Civic cameras — Cameras record your activities
24/7 in most city down towns in the U.S.
·
Commercial and private spaces — Today 68 percent
of public employers, 59 percent of
private employers, 98 percent of banks, 64 percent of public schools, and 16 percent of homeowners live or
work under cameras.
·
Smart home — Smart thermostats (like Nest)
detect your presence and behavior patterns and transmit these to the cloud.
Smart electrical outlets (like Belkin) monitor power consumption and usage
times shared to the cloud.
·
Home surveillance — Installed video cameras
document your activity inside and outside the home, stored on cloud servers.
·
Interactive devices — Your voice commands and
messages from phones (Siri, Now, Cortana), consoles (Kinect), smart TVs, and
ambient micro phones (Amazon Echo) are recorded and processed on the cloud.
·
Grocery loyalty cards — Supermarkets track which
items you purchase and when.
·
E- retailers — Retailers like Amazon track not
only what you purchase, but what you look at and even think about buying.
·
IRS — Tracks your financial situation all your
life.
·
Credit cards — Of course, every purchase is
tracked. Also mined deeply with sophisticated AI for patterns that reveal your
personality, ethnicity, idiosyncrasies, politics, and preferences.
·
E-wallets and e-banks — Aggregators like Mint
track your entire financial situation
from loans, mortgages, and investments. Wallets like Square and PayPal track
all purchases.
·
Photo face recognition — Facebook and Google can
identify (tag) you in pictures taken by
others posted on the web. The location of pictures can identify your location
history.
·
Web activities — Web advertising cookies track
your movements across the web. More than 80% of the top thousand sites employ
web cookies that follow you wherever you go on the web. Through agreements with
ad networks, even sites you did not visit can get information about your
viewing history.
·
Social media — Can identify family members,
friends, and friends of friends. Can identify and track your former employers
and your current work mates. And how you spend your free time.
·
Search browsers — By default Google saves every
question you’ve ever asked forever.
·
Streaming services — What movies (Netflix),
music (Spotify), video (You Tube) you consume and when, and what you rate them.
This includes cable companies; your watching history is recorded.
·
Book reading — Public libraries record your
borrowings for about a month. Amazon records book purchases forever. Kindle
monitors your reading patterns on ebooks — where you are in the book, how
long you take to read each page, where
you stop.
It is shockingly easy to imagine what power would accrue
to any agency that could integrate all these streams. The fear of Big Brother
stems directly from how technically easy it would be to stitch these together.
At the moment, however, most of these streams are independent. Their bits are
not integrated and correlated.
The Inevitable Kevin Kelly
A few strands may be coupled (credit cards and media
usage, say), but by and large there is not a massive Big Brother–ish aggregate
stream. Because they are slow, governments lag far behind what they could do
technically. (Their own security is irresponsibly lax and decades behind the
times.)
Also, the U.S. government has not unified these streams
because a thin wall of hard-won privacy laws holds them back. Few laws hold
corporations back from integrating as much data as they can; therefore
companies have become the proxy data gatherers for governments.
Data about customers is the new gold in business, so one
thing is certain: Companies (and indirectly governments) will collect more of
it.
The movie Minority Report, based on a short story by
Philip K. Dick, featured a not too distant future society that uses
surveillance to arrest criminals before they commit a crime. Dick called that
intervention "pre-crime" detection. I once thought Dick’s idea of
"pre-crime" to be utterly unrealistic. I don’t anymore.
If you look at the above list of routine tracking today,
it is not difficult to extrapolate another 50 years. All that was previously
unmeasurable is becoming quantified, digitized, and trackable. We’ll keep
tracking ourselves, we’ll keep tracking our friends, and our friends will track
us.
Companies and governments will track us more. Fifty years
from now ubiquitous tracking will be the norm.
From The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly, published on June 7,
2016 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin
Random House LLC. Copyright by Kevin Kelly, 2016.
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