It is extremely difficult to avoid documenting your life with the technology we face every day. We post our thoughts to Twitter. We update our status and upload our pictures to Facebook. We make videos of us with our friends and put them on Youtube. Most of these things we do without thinking. We do it because it’s fun. We do it because it keeps us connected to our friends and family. We do it without thinking about the millions of other people that have access to all of it.

It’s not just photos and thoughts and occasional videos of ourselves and others that we have the decision to publicize and keep track of anymore. It is now easier than ever to pinpoint the location of someone or something, whether it be with a GPS, tracking system, or through an app on your phone. FourSquare has become extremely popular, allowing you to become mayor of a certain place the more you visit it. Other apps let our friends track us to see if we’re close enough to hang out with. Some tracking devices are harmless enough. As noted in Ambient Findability, pets can be injected with radiofrequency identification tags in case they get lost. Personal locator devices can be used to help care for people with Alzheimer’s disease. The Digital Angel alerts caretakers by email when a patient has wandered out of a designated area. At Legoland in Denmark, parents can pay three euros to have their child tagged for the day. The locator, attached by disposable wristband, tracks the child anywhere in Legoland. But when do tracking devices cross the line and start to invade personal privacy? Wherify Wireless GPS Personal Locator for Kids is a watch, pager, and tracking device that parents can lock on their children’s wrist with a special key fob. Would you consider that acceptable? If you want to spy on someone without them knowing, a wide variety of covert tracking devices are sold at websites like spyville.com (Morville, ch.4). Although these websites sell hundreds to thousands of products daily, most people would consider these devices to be a violation of privacy.

Individually-owned tracking devices aren’t the only types of surveillance that are keeping track of people every day. Cameras are everywhere. Almost every business, whether they be stores, restaurants, or offices, and most public places are now being filmed by surveillance cameras. Some cameras record the footage to be viewed later, but many send the footage to live feeds that can be watched in real-time. Many public cameras, such as certain beaches or a live feed of Times Square, can be viewed online in real-time by millions of people at once. How many of these cameras do you pass in a month? A week? A day? How many times have you been recorded doing your every-day activities? Certain cameras are being programmed to serve specific functions/look for specific things. The SENTRI system in Chicago and L.A., for instance, uses microphones to recognize the sound of gunshots; it can then precisely locate the point of origin, turn a camera to center the shooter in the viewfinder, and make a 911 call to summon the police (Morville, p.88). This technology is becoming more advanced every day. One group of scientists are working on a set of flying cameras that look like robotic insects; these cameras will be able to pinpoint specific activities, network with each other, and record virtually anything. (SwarMav). Eventually, all of these networks will be interconnected, and able to be accessed by almost anyone. As quoted in Ubiquitous Mobile, Persistent Surveillance, “Not only will governments and large institutions posses the technology of surveillance (Big Brother is watching) but individuals will be monitoring as well (everybody is watching everybody).” The movie Eagle Eye illustrates a terrifying possibility of what our technology could one day be capable of doing. (You can watch the trailer here.) Although this technology definitely has positive advantages, we need to start being careful of the dangers it possesses.

While some people feel more and more secure with the advanced tech, others are beginning to worry about their privacy, even becoming paranoid. How do we stay anonymous with the technology that is being unveiled every day? How do we keep our private lives private? And if we can’t, do we begin to challenge it, or accept it?