Tracking your every move - Today and tomorrow

Abstract

Not too long ago, tracking the movements of individuals was an obscure activity largely reserved for detective novels and the occasional creepy stalker. Lately, however, massive-scale continuous location surveillance has quietly become a fact of life, pursued by organizations as diverse as Google, Amazon, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Department of Transportation, not to mention cyber-criminals, jealous spouses and helicopter parents. An equally wide range of technologies is used for this virtual stakeout job, including spyware on your laptop and mobile devices, roadside radio receivers (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and more), license plate reading devices, face-recognizing surveillance cameras, RFID tags and readers, and more. In this keynote lecture, we will review some of the more pervasive people-tracking methods in use today, together with some of their more (or less) well-known uses. We'll then put on a pair of decidedly rose-colored glasses, and try to see what good our Orwellian future may bring, and what challenges lie ahead, beyond the quaint notion of protecting your location privacy.