I guess the Brits have completely given up on the idea of privacy. They are already tracked by 2 million cameras throughout the country, their cars are soon to be tracked by satellite and electronic vehicle tags, and the EU is talking about tracking movement between countries with fingerprints. What’s next?
Well, how about they start tracking your cell phone so that they can tell where you are to within meters?
Customers in shopping centres are having their every move tracked by a new type of surveillance that listens in on the whisperings of their mobile phones.
The technology can tell when people enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there, and what route they take as they walked around.
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It has already been installed in two shopping centres, including Gunwharf Quays in Portsmouth, and three more centres will begin using it next month, Times Online has learnt.
That’s nice. In its current incarnation as a stand-alone private system, the invasion of privacy is limited:
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) expressed cautious approval of the technology, which does not identify the owner of the phone but rather the handset’s IMEI code – a unique number given to every device so that the network can recognise it.
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Only the phone network can match a handset’s IMEI number to the personal details of a customer.
That seems comforting…but given that UK law enforcement personnel can already access phone records without a warrant, it’s only a matter of time before they link the two types of networks together.
So within a few years, any law enforcement official in the UK will be able to follow every movement of your car, track your perambulations via their camera network and the cell phone locating system, and match that up to your health, credit card, banking, and even DNA records.
A year and a half ago, a report was prepared for the British government, entitled “A Report on the Surveillance Society.” In it, they compare the life of a family in 2006 to that of a family 10 years later:
…the Jones family are under surveillance every day, and in a large number of events and activities, and could be far more integrated in surveillance processes in 2016. Some of the surveillance processes are benign or helpful to them; others have more ominous or exploitative implications for a host of values and interests that the Joneses, as ordinary citizens, hold to be important, and that their country holds as important to its idea of a good life in a democratic society governed democratically by the rule of law.For a great deal of the time, the Joneses do not know, or understand, what happens or can happen to their personal information: what is being collected, processed, sorted and communicated. Most of the time, these are not matters of concern to them; but sometimes, things begin to go wrong for them, and they suspect that something has happened to their information to bring about adverse consequences. What do they think can be done about that? What can be done about it, and by whom, if not the Joneses? What keeps surveillance within legitimate bounds?
The only problem with the report is that most of their predictions for 2016 will happen by 2010.
