I LIKE TO WATCH

[defrog]

Regarding yesterday’s post on the outrage over illegal spying – when it’s done by sports teams, not the govt – bluesgirly’s comment that spying isn’t a DIY thing got me to thinking. Because actually, it is. The amateur surveillance business is a pretty lucrative one, and modern technology makes it easier than ever.

Take yr mobile phone. I get press releases all the time from companies touting all sorts of surveillance/tracking features and services using a cell phone. Mobile operators here in Hong Kong, Singapore and elsewhere in Asia offer home surveillance services. Stick an infrared webcam with a SIM card in yr home, and access it over the network via yr mobile. Record video on a 512MB memory card. Just $6.00 a month. Popular with parents who want to see if their kids are smashing the furniture or if the maid is stealing the silverware.

Worried that yr spouse is having an affair? Try FlexiSpy. Download it onto the target’s phone when they’re not looking, and automatically receive copies of text messages, call logs, emails, locations and listen to conversations. Or you can put it on yr own phone and bug meeting rooms.

Also just out: the CSI Stick, a thumb drive that plugs into a mobile and extracts all the data out of it. Ostensibly aimed at law enforcement officials, but nothing in the press release says that they won’t sell it to anyone willing to pony up $200.

If you want to track someone’s location, just stick a GPS receiver in their bag/car/whatever. Or try services like Trackapartner.com, which uses GPS to track any GSM mobile phone – just enter the target’s phone number, and off you go. If all else fails, GPS panties are also available.

Want to do background checks on office rivals or blind dates? Forget Google – that’s SO 2006. Try other search engines like ZabaSearch.com for criminal histories, or Spock.com and Wink.com to dig up personal pages, such as social-networking profiles. Zillow.com estimates the value of people's homes. Huffington Post's Fundrace feature tracks their campaign donations.

Surveillance is also for retail businesses too – and not just security cameras. Shopping centers in the UK (the surveillance capital of the world) are using technology that tracks customers via their mobiles to determine things like when they entered the shopping center, what stores they visited, how long they remained there, and what route they took as they walked around. Why? To determine traffic patterns and consumer behavior to calculate everything from marketing promotions to adjusting opening hours.

There’s a hundred variants to all of these, and I haven’t mentioned things like spyware for computers, or corporate espionage. And most of this technology has been around for at least several years now.

Is any of this legal or ethical? Well, like the NSA, it depends on where you live and how you do it. But when you live in a world where govts believe they have a unilateral right to spy on anyone in the name of national security and build massive databases on its citizenry, and where corporations are hiring ex-CIA spooks for their corporate security depts and spying on journalists and organizations as well as each other, then that’s inevitably going to set the example for the rest of us. Burger King can do it – why can’t we?

Mind you, I don’t know how many people actually use all the stuff I just listed, or that they’re necessarily bad people for using them. But I do think we’re sleepwalking into a voluntary surveillance state without fully realizing it. That may sound worse than the reality – maybe it’s what we want, if we think we’re getting something beneficial in return, like safety from crime and teh terrorisms, or peace of mind about the welfare of loved ones, or relevant content, or free amateur pr0n, or sheer entertainment value, or revenge against yr enemies, or whatever.

But if we say it’s okay for personal use, then are we also justifying the right of Team Bush, Wal-mart and the New England Patriots to do it too?

Discuss.

DISCLAIMER: Yr comments will be recorded for quality-control purposes.

Here’s looking at you,

This is dF

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BONUS TRACK: This just in – researchers in Germany have discovered that an inexpensive telescope can pick up computer images from almost any reflective object nearby. At Saarland University, researchers trained a $500 telescope on a teapot near a computer monitor 5 meters away. The images are tiny but amazingly clear, the researchers claim.

Comments

[def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com]

Personally, I have three (3) social networking profiles – two are for professional purposes and reveal no data that's not already available on my company's site. The third contains zero actual personal details – much like this LJ, it's intended to be anonymous, so I make stuff up.