Excellent post!
Thanks. I think people need to be aware of these things, and awareness can only be raised through education.
For example, what happens when you go grocery shopping?
Well, most people would say you just go to the store, and then buy whatever, and go home. This is not correct.
Let me explain.
First you determine that you need some groceries, so you head for your car, you pick up the smart-phone from the living room table, because you 'need to be available' in the event of anything happening (strange how people survived before smart phones existed.. but I digress..). You're now under surveillance. Your location can be pinpointed quite accurately through triangulation, possibly over wifi as well if you have this turned on, and you pass any such wifi antennas that receives packets from your phone. This data, is stored by the telecoms, and most likely (I would be very surprised if it's not the case), if you live in the US, the information about your smart phone's movement pattern is collected and injected to a big-data system. That way, the NSA can find 'interesting' travel patterns, and they can combine this information with who you are talking with, and I would not be surprised if the complete content is stored as well. Remember that the NSA and the government will
lie to you. If they state that something is not done, I would be suspicious, and if they state it is done, I would be suspicious as well. History has proven that lies are the way of the 'game'. And for intelligence, confusion tactics is what matters. Do not do what the adversary expects, and sometimes with an intelligent adversary, you do the opposite of what would be normal to do with such adversaries (hide in plain sight), there are many methods, of which I'm probably unaware.
Anyway, you're sitting in your car, heading for the store. High above you, there might be eyes watching your every move. Helicopters, spyplanes, satellites. Usually, single families or individuals are not targeted, but the eyes are there, and I'm not aware of the present situation with drones of various sizes, but expect the surveillance to increase even more in the future.
Oh, you pass a couple of police cars, you don't take much notice of it, but the police cars do. They have a plate recognition system and cameras in their cars, and this system is automatically filming your license plate, and comparing it to the database of various lists they keep, perhaps you did not pay the govt. licenses necessary for your car, there's a warrant on your arrest, you're a known criminal, or otherwise.. In most cases, nothing happens, and we do not frankly know if the collected data is discarded right away, or if it is stored for big data purposes. If you happen to be unlucky, you might get stopped and hassled by the police, even if everything really is in order, because if their computer system shows something's up, then you will have a very hard time explaining to them that it's an error.
Okay, you wasn't stopped by police this time, so you continue driving, then you pass a few intersections, where the local government also have cameras. these could be used to issue automatic tickets, did you drive on a red light, did you speed, and there could also be recoding of your license plate again, for purposes of road taxation, statistics about road usage etc. As a driver you don't know much about this, and you're seldom informed about what's going on,and what the data is being used for. But know this, if you use your own car, and bring with you your own cell phone, your every move is tracked. If you for whatever reason do not want to be tracked, be aware of how you have to do it. In addition the police cars could as well have stingrays (devices used to check where a particular handset is located), this is however to my knowledge mostly used in residential areas. For instance, if you have a criminal that never surfaced to his trial, police enforcement might use this equipment to track him down in a hotel facility. Knowing his phone number, they simply walk around on the premises, until they find the room where he's at. As criminals usually are quite stupid, they don't see this connection or realize that their mobile phone is a liability and might expose them.
But again I digress. You finally arrive at the parking lot of the store. You park your car. Again there's security cameras filming your every move. Guards for the parking company will most likely film and register your presence as well, and if you pay for parking with a debit or credit card, now both the parking company, and the financial company knows about you parking at that very spot. If not happening presently, it will most likely be obligatory in the future to have systems integrated with the surveillance system that will notify authorities if there's a 'suspect' vehicle at the parking lot, possibly connected to the same databases that law enforcement uses. So once parked, your license plate is registered, and then it will be sent of to some law enforcement agency, which will check it against their database, and if there's reason to believe something's up, for instance if there's a warrant on your arrest, police will be dispatched to the shopping center, and you will be arrested. I don't think such a system currently is in place, but it will come..
Now, when entering the mall, you're being filmed again, and inside the mall there will be numerous cameras, depending on the size of the store, there might as well be a dedicated control room, where some guards are sitting watching the customers, and if you for any reason at all appears suspicious, they might follow you around on the cameras. For instance if you're a Muslim with a long beard, a turban and carrying a suitcase, you might be 'a person of interest' and the guard will follow you on the monitors and using the cameras, which he might as well be able to operate remotely, so they can be turned, zoomed etc. and check you out. If you're a woman, and there's a guard unsupervised in the control room, he might as well zoom in on your cleavage or buttocks and take screen shots or images of it. Young NSA employees were know to pass explicit images around that they fetched from various places. According to Snowden revelations. Do you imagine young security guards with hardly any education is any better?
Most customers will be unaware of this surveillance, and never think of it. What about you just stare into the camera when you see it, let your eyes linger, like to say: "I know you're there". The guard in the control room will probably be freaked out, and if you're unlucky he might as well call the police on you, because your behavior was 'suspicious'. So perhaps best to pretend you don't know about the cameras. Haha.
Then there's face recognition software. This is deployed on some airports. If it's deployed in shopping malls, I don't know, but if it isn't it's sure to come. I'm sure police enforcement will push this pointing to the crime fighting opportunities, however the amount of false positives can be a really big issue.
Anyway, you finally made it through the store, and tracking you throughout the store is possible by tracking your mobile phone and also your face. And in the future, if not already present on many locations, the advertisements you see in store, will be optimized to increase your spending. Tracking you with face recognition, your mobile phone, and by knowing your spending habits, everything you buy with a bonus card is recorded by the retailer, why do you think they offer bonus cards? In addition the shopping center can store all your purchases, and so does your bank/payment provider.
You can imagine a scenario where you always buys a certain vegetable, and since this is known to the mall, once you go to the part of the store with fruits and vegetables, once you pass a screen, it will notice the presence of your smart phone, or know through face recognition (security cams), and you will be served targeted adds. Today, there's a special discount of 10%, if you buy 5 of the vegetable you usually buy 3 off, and if you combine it with [insert some fruit here], the total discount will reach a total of 25%. Tempting, and it will most likely work great for the store. Getting customers to buy more is a science in itself, and now with directional sound speakers, you might as well be the only one hearing the commercial (probably not happening today - but wait for the future...)
Anyway, when you go to the checkout, all of your groceries is recorded in the shopping mall system, and you will probably never know how that information is stored, tied to your name and used for marketing purposes, but it will be used, by targeting you with specialized ads. For instance, it's not unthinkable that based on your shopping habits, your ISP, the payment processor and the shopping mall will collaborate such that you can be served targeted ads on your home computer based on your spending habits. And it will work, these companies will extract more money from you, and that's why they're in business in the first place.
So you might say, aah. okay so what. I don't care. Well, imagine this scenario. You have a fairly decent job, wage is good, and life is in general good. You have payment of your housing on auto payment with the bank, and every month you have substantive income, so payment is usually not an issue. One month you find yourself short coming payment day, but you will receive money 5 days later, so you call the bank and ask them if they can extend you some credit, so the landlord will get paid, since money will enter the account in a few days anyway, pointing to previous history on the account.. The clerk at the bank rejects, telling you that you sure goes to a lot of restaurants. The clerk can see your spending pattern. How is that any of his business? So you were rejected credit, because of your eating habits, and now your landlord will be made at you because payment is not prompt. Even if you were a very long standing customer with the bank, never gave them a problem, you could still be rejected, because they look at your payment pattern. You could try convince them that you have good paying job, to no avail. If the clerk is an ass, or blindly follows company rules, there will be an issue.
Imo, this is an issue. The bank is supposed to be a payment institution, not someone who passes personal judgment. There has been instances where gun shops, porno stars etc. has been rejected as customers, simply because the bank do not like them or their business.
You do not go and advertise to everybody what you bought in the store that day, so why should the shopping mall or the bank have this information. The info might as well be sold to insurance companies which builds models as to who's most likely to die from lifestyle related sicknesses. You always buy cigarets and sugary drinks from the store, sorry - no life insurance for you - no security for your family if you die- and you will never know the reason why you got rejected.
The shop only needs to know how much was sold of every item, and recording only the sale and the time stamp. There should be no customer data attached to this, in my opinion. It's very wrong that the complete list of items could be shared with several companies.
So how do you protect yourself?
- Well you could leave the cell phone at home.
- Not much you could do about the road surveillance if you use your car, unless you use somebody elses car, or switches number plates (but that's illegal)
- At the store you could use cash - using bitcoins can be an options some places as well, it's recorded on the blockchain, but not necessarily easily connected to your person.
- Maybe prepaid anonymous credit cards could be used?
- Never use those bonus cards (its used to track your spending habbits)
- Never use the apps the stores advertise, these are most likely used for all kinds of nefarious purposes like targeted advertising, tracking of your location, seeing who your friends are etc.
- Use a caps on your head to make it harder for cameras to see your face.
While some of this post is borderline conspiracy theory territorial, much of it is already present. If you live in a city, put on caps, then just walk to the store and pay in cash, that's as anonymous as you get these days. Or if you're rich, you could always get an assistant to do the shopping for you!
