How They Scored

Not long after I started using Twitter, I started to wonder: Why? Imagine the familiar movie scenario where a detective is desperate to track and find a suspect, or where a detective is hired by a suspicious spouse to trail their errant husband or wife. Or an alternate scenario from the Cold War, where the secret police manipulate ordinary citizens to inform on one another (cf. the film The Lives of Others , pictured at left). Or the horrible situation of a controlling husband who wants to know where his wife is at every minute of the day. In those situations, one person wants to track another; the person who is tracked would rather not be tracked and sometimes would do anything to avoid it. Now consider yourself, or any ordinary bourgeois, and how much you are tracked on a daily (and sometimes minute-to-minute) basis. Credit card companies and credit reporting firms register every purchase you make with something other than cash. Airlines, grocery stores and other businesses with rew...

This story on wired.com , about the difficulty of losing your identity and taking up another, is something I wrote about in How They Scored. The characters are looking at the business possibilities of a proposed business named Dreedle, which would compile vast databases of consumer behavior; the narrator reflects on how such databases would make it difficult to disappear, as you used to be able to in the old days. There were plenty of things about me I didn't want rolled up into some online repository. One or two of these things I might confide to a lover -- that I liked to watch a certain kind of porn, for example (though I wasn't sure Meeghan was ready to know that). Another, less embarrassing detail I might write about on a blog -- my appreciation of the Giants infielders, say, or my enthusiasm for Russian composers. Other things I wouldn't mind mentioning in a phone call to my mother. But put them all together, combined with the records of everything I buy, books I rea...

This prototype phone from Nokia would be able to track your health and other "conditions." Apparently you strap on a sensor that monitors your vital signs, sends the data to the phone over a wireless signal, and then God knows what happens to the information.

This is just astonishing: The next time you visit your doctor for your appointment and flip through the pages of the magazines kept in the reception room, you might not be aware of the fact that a watch is being kept on your reading habits using RFID. Mediamark Research & Intelligence and DJG Marketing have come together to use RFID for measuring magazine readership in public waiting rooms. More here . RFID is the little bitty chip already used to track library books, merchandise, and in some localities, children.