Tonight, I’m spending some time recovering from a head cold, watching videos of undercover cops at OWS, reading articles about what’s going on in Egypt, and listening to some music on my cell phone. It hits me... our cell phones have so much technology jammed into the little plastic covers that we cannot even begin to explain all the bells and whistles. But even more than the cell phones themselves, is the fact that these devices constantly send and receive signals, regardless if a call is being placed or online content is queried. Our cell phones need to communicate with the nearest cell towers to show us how many “bars” of signal we have. Can’t something like this be tracked? I did some digging and found a technology that has been around for a couple years now, specifically to track you as you move around a shopping mall.
This technology is known as FootPath, brought to you by Path Intelligence. As customers move around a mall, the last thing organizers and police want to see is too many people huddling around outside stores. Not only does it create traffic (literally), but it also proves as an open ground for pick-pockets. Mall management wanted ways to be sure traffic flows smoothly so that these risks of being in crowds doesn’t hit their happy shoppers. FootPath developed a technology that tracks peoples’ cell phones as it moves across a grid. The grid consists of a couple base station receivers and a central server for an analyst. Typically, this is used for stores to identify where shoppers go to the most within their stores and to be sure there isn’t a build up of customers in any particular store, putting them at threat for shop-lifting. The cell phone signal is detected for each individual in the store (with a cell phone) and for all the individuals across the mall and its parking lot.
Some privacy advocates identify the threat to consumer privacy, after all, they believe it’s much like police using a GPS on your car as you drive around town, except it’s on everybody in town rather than just you. The signal is monitored anonymously without ever providing personally identifiable information to the central server, just to please such advocates, but the security analyst in me doesn’t see any difficulty changing the system to do so in the nature that a serious threat occurs in the mall. Overall, the technology seems to make sense, because it helps mall coordinators and shop managers optimize their space to enhance both safe traffic flow and increase sales.
Now...
What if a system like this can be deployed on a city-wide scale... say... by putting such nodes on the prime cell towers around the city? Police or fire rescue could use this technology to locate people in natural disasters, or help move people away from a hazardous area. I could also see a use to be sure that if a situation develops, that human stampedes don’t occur because police need to step in. I see great potential, but who’s to say that this system isn’t already in place? Perhaps we could use this to save lives in places like Haiti, or Japan... (oh the possibilities).
Going back to my first point, all about some of the things I've been doing with my night, I believe that people deserve a certain level of privacy, but that a balance should be made for security. Police at OWS and armed guards in Egypt have already proved some abuses have been made. What is stopping anybody from abusing this tracking system as a means of unnecessary control?
I am in it for the science, and for the future. Remember to analyze, act, and adapt as the world changes, because anything can happen in the future.
Ninja Edit:
Looks like Canada has some explaining to do... Spying on their own citizens in the name of public safety and to the tune of millions of taxpayer dollars.
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