[KaiserJeep]

In the balance I decided that "Open Topic" was the place for this discussion. The topic is the many ways that your privacy is being invaded by everyone else. Such intrusions are not just from TPTB, they include everybody, especially even the criminals around you. I hope that in the process, this thread brings about an understanding of the myriad ways that others are using technology to intrude upon you. This is not however likely to be a thread that produces comfort for you, perhaps you would prefer not to know these things. In which case you were warned and made the free choice to go on reading.

I came about much of this information in my career building NonStop computers that count money - almost all money everywhere, and because I am a fan of SF, where everything from the online world of today to the paranoid fantasy of "Big Brother" was anticipated and explored before it actually came to be.

Firstly as a matter of convenience, I will coin a term we can use, called "YPR", which stands for "Your Permanent Record". It amuses me because my parents used to threaten me with YPR as a means to influence my behavior. I doubt they ever knew how prophetic that was. It is your digital life, recorded on dozens and hundreds of computers, distributed around the world, and not at all manageable or even accessable to the individual being tracked. YPR exists in multiple countries because many international organizations exist with an interest in you, from corporations to greedy merchants to curious researchers to criminals seeking to prey upon you.

When I saw how lengthy this draft of the first message grew, I decided to break it into individual posts for your convenience when responding. The next two posts in this thread will focus upon "Financial Transactions" and "Location Tracking".

[KaiserJeep]

Financial Transactions - Obviously, every time you use any form of electronic currency, from a credit account linked to your phone to PayPal to BitCoin, you leave tracks and detailed records in YPR. Your purchases, your history of what you purchased over the past decades, the way your tastes and appetites have changed, all of these things are in your detailed online history. These records are the most detailed of all, because data mining and tailoring marketing for you using such records maximizes your purchases, and even the debt load for most people.

Perhaps you did not understand that paper currency transactions are also monitored and tracked and are not anonymous. In many countries such as the USA paper currency is serialized with unique numbers. It is almost universal that each cash register is within the view of an HDTV camera which is part of a security system, and almost all such systems are connected to the network. It is common today for each individual camera to have a unique IP address and to be accessible to anyone anywhere in the world. The person tracking that $1 bill in your hand might be your boss, or might be an overseas assassin seeking a target known to have possessed that same bill, and building a file of known associates.

Meanwhile the banks and ATMs and even vending machines also read, record, and transmit currency serial numbers. Larger bills - such as I believe every US $100 and larger bill, can also contain a hard to detect RFID transponder, as part of what they euphemistly told you was a "Mylar security ribbon" embedded in the paper. Not all such bills have transponders, but the technology exists and is used upon occaision. You only have to pass between (possibly hidden) detectors for the RFID to be recorded.

If such things interest you, you can buy networked RFID scanners and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) apps for your PC or smartphone and gain the same capabilities. Meanwhile, the takeaway message is that nothing you do with money, either real or electronic currency, is truly anonymous. Even that vending machine that you stuff unserialized coins into may be recording your face - the camera is the same size as the tiny dot on the display side of your phone, and you are unlikely to notice it.

Even when you pass cash outside of the view of any camera, transactions are noted and entered in YPR. If for example a bill that you got from an ATM ends up being spent by the wife of a cocaine dealer at a grocery store when next scanned, there is an implied transaction that does not reflect favorably upon you.

[KaiserJeep]

Location tracking - Some of this is pretty obvious. For example, you know and understand that you paid hundreds of dollars for a Smartphone that you carry around, containing a GPS chip. That chip is running and calculating your position all the time. But perhaps you did not understand that other devices you have, including tablets, fitness monitors, and most vehicles today, are also GPS enabled. Any of these things can be used to track your location. In fact even on the few phones that allow you to disable the GPS chip to supposedly "conserve battery power", it probably wasn't turned off. Even if you have a (technically illegal in the USA) phone that allows the GPS to be disabled, the older location algorithyms based upon signal strength from your phone as read on the cell towers still function, and your location can still be determined, with a bit less accuracy.

Big Brother decided that you didn't get to decide whether you wanted to be tracked or not, so he made that happen. If you for any reason are "a person of interest", that location tracking persists as part of YPR, often for years or decades.

Suppose you decide to deliberately avoid carrying anything that contains a GPS chip. That actually does not prevent your location from being tracked either. You might be using a WiFi enabled device with a unique MAC address, or a BlueTooth device with a unique identifier, and these things may be associated with an individual such as you in YPR.

"But", you say, "so what?", nobody knows about my brand new WiFi network, or my new BlueTooth headphones or music speaker.

Well, they most probably do know. When I bought the wife a new iPad online for Christmas, and bought myself a new Android tablet at Costco, the barcodes on the packaging were scanned and the devices associated with me via my credit card.

Even if you buy a used WiFi access point at a yard sale using cash, once you take it into your home and power it on and logon to it with a mobile device like a phone with a GPS chip, the physical location of the WiFi network and the fact that it belongs to YOU become part of YPR.

Meanwhile, you won't be anonymous when walking about with a WiFi or Bluetooth mobile device, as you are broadcasting a unique device identifier associated in YPR with YOU.

"OK", you say, "I can still drive my 1984 Honda with no GPS navigation around anonymously." Well, pretty obviously NO that doesn't work any more either. 78% of the traffic cams (the percentage increases steadily) are in fact network attached, with OCR software that allows them to track your vehicle license plate. In fact, don't drive that vehicle anywhere unless the tags are current, there are no unpaid traffic tickets, and especially if you are in the company of someone whoom your spouse would be displeased to note was in the vehicle when the red light photo citation arrives in the mail.

Nor is it just traffic cams. Almost 3/4ths of the police cars today have scanners called "ALPRs", which stands for "Automatic License Plate Recognition", the cop can be asleep when you roll by at a low speed and the computer will wake him up and tell him that a vehicle in violation of the law just rolled by, anything from a fugitive or an Amber Alert to lapsed insurance can cause an alarm. Here in Silicon valley, I have seen four of these ALPRs on one police vehicle, on all four corners of the roof, facing outwards and scanning 360 degrees continuously.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Meanwhile the banks and ATMs and even vending machines also read, record, and transmit currency serial numbers. Larger bills - such as I believe every US $100 and larger bill, can also contain a hard to detect RFID transponder, as part of what they euphemistly told you was a "Mylar security ribbon" embedded in the paper. Not all such bills have transponders, but the technology exists and is used upon occaision. You only have to pass between (possibly hidden) detectors for the RFID to be recorded.

Aside from collectors holding a relative handful, the largest US currency in use since 1969 has been the $100 bill.

Although they are still legal tender in the United States, high-denomination bills were last printed on December 27, 1945, and officially discontinued on July 14, 1969, by the Federal Reserve System,[9] due to 'lack of use'. The $5,000 and $10,000 effectively disappeared well before then.[nb 1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_den ... s_currency

[Outcast_Searcher]

I have a friend who, literally, is a political activist, who actively picks fights with powerful people as he battles what he perceives to be injustices via high utility prices, reductions in government entitlement programs, etc.

As such, he's made plenty of enemies.

He's convinced the ALPR's are used by cops to track him when he travels, and he's convinced the cops use ANY excuse (including lying about minor traffic violations) to pull him over and harrass him.

I refuse to help them by joining social media, etc. but if they want to track which cereal (fibery), toilet paper (cheap), etc. I use, I hope they enjoy the process since I steadfastly ignore marketing unless I am specifically shopping for a major product at the time.

[MD]

oh just ignore all that. Yeah you are being watched by the machine. Just move along. Nothing you can do about it.

[Newfie]

The irony here is that, IIRC, in 1984 they did NOT monitor all people, the vast majority of folks are irrelevant. The did monitor some smallish fraction of the population that were significant enough to warrent surrivelliance.

I know some 6 years ago the Wife panicked when I didn’t call home for a week. (Yes, I told here that was going to happen. No, she didn’t listen to what I said.). Anyway, I was up a remote fjord in Newfoundland, out of radio reach. She called the Canadian CG to initiate a search. They asked for my cc number and found I had bought something at a tiny store on my way in.

That’s how I got a satellite phone.

[KaiserJeep]

The difference is that today, by monitoring you and your geographical location and everything that you do online, they can make more money from you. The fact that they know who you are, where you are, and what you are doing allows them to more effectively market to you things that you are likely to buy. So your privacy vanished, because now they had a reason to want to know, and software that could monitor everybody all the time everywhere. Now they can enter your SSN or other unique identifier and see a summary of who/what/when/where/why, because it's simpler for them, there's no delay, and you can be more easily manipulated and controlled.

They see a profile of the things you buy, cash or credit. They know how much alcohol and how much marijuana (if legal in your state). If you buy adult diapers or blood glucose test strips or research online the symptoms of a certain disease, it's all there. If you checkout books from a library on kitchen cabinet construction, travel guides to a specific area, strategies for minimizing tax liabilities, anything at all, your life is an open book if anybody cares to read it.

We are talking about every term you ever entered in a search engine, every image of naked women/men/children/animals/internal combustion engines/whatever you ever viewed. If you are a woman and your online research on pregnancies turns into interest in abortions, they know what your decision was before you told your husband or significant other. If an interest in cancer treatments for a specific disease turns into an interest in hospice care and death with dignity, they know before you tell anybody else.

Every time you swabbed your cheek and paid for DNA anaysis, they knew who your real ancestors were before you got the geneology charts yourself. Perhaps you are dating one of JFK's grandchildren without even knowing that, but they know based on your online profile, who and how long, where you met and the interests you share.

What's more, they now have reasons to want to understand all these things, the means to monitor everybody, everywhere, all the time, without excessive labor or expense. Cash or credit or debit or bitcoins or whatever, they know how much, where you spent it, where you are planning on spending it, and approximately when. "They" can include people, but definately do include computers, all the time, everywhere for everybody.

Even when nobody bothers to read your online dossier, it exists. The activities of everybody everywhere are monitored for endless reasons, because information is money, a further means of of understanding where your head is at, and a way of widening the gap between the hapless populace and those who prey upon them, seek their votes, and most of all sell things to them.

Tweets. twitters, texts, and e-mails, converstaions on landlines and cell phones, all can be recorded, transcribed if there is a reason - and now there are a multitude of reasons and motives for watching and listening and analyzing what you do and are thinking of doing. Every word you ever typed into any thread under any online persona, whenever you switched identities, changed genders, or even the things you are thinking of doing, but haven't decided to do yet.

Big Brother is watching, listening, reading, and remembering. Everybody, all the time, everywhere. This week, my wife received a handwritten letter from a realtor, somebody she did tax preparation for a couple of years ago, expressing warm wishes and offering help in marketing our home. This week, my daughter posted pictures of her kids in open gym, and gave us their growth percentiles from the well toddler checkups, and the short list of pre-schools they are considering.

Meanwhile, I'm buying tech toys to ensure we have our video preferences to choose from, our music collection, and a plentiful supply of our favored coffees and teas and everything else we consume, on Nantucket.

We are monitoring the online crime statistics, we are strategizing about minimizing our chances of being victimized while banking, shopping, and traveling here in the Silicon Valley. We are examining the photos of those who steal packages off of front porches, the kids smoking pot on the corner, and those who are casing the homes in the neighborhoods, what they are driving and what they are wearing, and their visible gang tattoos.

It's the modern equivalent of the paleolithic hunter, sniffing the wind, approaching the herd from downwind, and selecting an arrow or spear. I'm about to shower, change clothes, and go to my monthly doctor visit for blood tests. Just before leaving, I will check traffic on the planned route. Anybody who cares to know can follow my GPS-enabled tablet, and anticipate my stop at my customary sandwich shop afterwards. They can read the e-mails about the food I am planning to buy and prepare for dinner, and probably guess the supermarket I'll hit on the way home.

[MD]

Not bad KJ. "Big Brother" has arrived on the scene. Go hide, stand in his face with innocent intent, or fight back. The last option is a fool's errand.

George O had some serious look-ahead skills. He got the details wrong, but the theme was spot-on.

[Newfie]

I think Brave New World was more accurate.

The state doesn’t need to manipulate us into a fact deprived stupor, we do it ourselves.

[MD]

I think Brave New World was more accurate.

The state doesn’t need to manipulate us into a fact deprived stupor, we do it ourselves.

Another decent "look-ahead" effort. Heinlein had a few serious hits too. As did a few others, in various ways. Clarke had some wins.

I do enjoy look-ahead fiction. Some of them are way out there, like Asimov, Niven, Star Trek, Star Wars, etc etc. Fun but so very unlikely. "Humanity wins the galaxy".

Not going to happen that way.