4 ms·

Someone following you in person takes...well...a person. Following you digitally takes some electricity, bandwidth, storage, and code.

joonix 13y ago
So the problem people have with this is the lower cost to the store? They'd be happy with the tracking if the store had to spend more resources to do it? I doubt it.
- jevinskie 13y ago
  I think the point is they wouldn't stand for it if minders followed them all over the store.
  - superuser2 13y ago
    Security personnel undercover as shoppers already exist and are widely deployed to surreptitiously follow suspicious people. We can and do and will continue to stand for it.
    - gradstudent 13y ago
      We stand for it only because the people being tracked are likely to be criminals. We understand that if we do not engage in criminal activity we will very likely not be followed. If my local store started tracking me for no good reason I would go elsewhere.
      - superuser2 13y ago
        >If my local store started tracking me for no good reason You can know that the store uses secret shoppers in general but unless the secret shoppers are terrible at their jobs, you wouldn't know whether or not you're being tracked. Also, doing traffic analysis and strategically placing displays in retail stores has been happening since long before cell phones. Just put someone behind one-way glass, on the mezzanie level of a mall, or even right on the floor with a clipboard.
        gradstudent 13y ago
        I do not disagree that tracking happens. What I disagree with is your implication that the scale at which it happens is irrelevant. It isn't. A security officer tracking me in a mall or a secret shopper recording my actions constitutes a single data point. Mechanically recording of all my movements within the store by tracking my cell-phone removes entirely all of my anonymity. This kind of stuff is creepy, Orwellian and it can fuck right off.
    - obituary_latte 13y ago
      There is a difference between security personnel (who may be responsible for observing hundreds or thousands of people per shift) and wholesale aggregation, analyzing, and collection of data.
Wingman4l7 13y ago
Which is cheap compared to, say, a private investigator. Not to mention that it scales a lot more easily -- and such data is a lot more fine-grained and more easily manipulated than any report you'd get from a P.I. trailing someone.
- superuser2 13y ago
  It's okay for them to have the data only if the reporting functionality is poor? What? Either it's private or it's not.
superuser2 13y ago
I've always hated this argument. Banning efficiency, of all things, seems counterproductive. If someone (or a government) really cares, they can simply spend the resources to do full-scale surveillance and tracking the old-fashioned way. It's not like we'll refuse to pay for it, given budgets what they are today. Lack of technology didn't stop the surveillance apparatuses of the USSR or East Germany. They just had larger staffs than we do. Either something is okay, in which case it's okay to do with a machine, or it's not, in which case it's not okay to do at all. If it's okay to tail someone with a police car, it's okay to follow them with a drone. You stop mass surveillance not by making it cost the taxpayer more, but by outlawing mass surveillance and requiring some sort of suspicion or probable cause for each individual case. People who want to track and surveil others like efficiency, but are in general still capable of hard work. Raising the effort required stops only the most pedestrian violators.
- obituary_latte 13y ago
  Whoa. Once the code is written and so long as the rest of the infrastructure is in place, it can be done wholesale. Cheaply. In perpetuity. To anyone. To do so sans technology requires an undue amount of resource. Ie the energy required to surveil 1x1 personally vs algorithmically is substantial and one is much more feasible than the other (especially if you don't read the TOS - and who does?) All that said, though, I think we are mostly on the same page: you have to accept responsibility for your actions in public. I think where we differ though is that the majority of people don't have a clue wtf is actually going on. PS the argument doesn't hate you. It's willing to take any and all input, process it, and maybe come out changed. It loves, respects, and thrives on you.
  - superuser2 13y ago
    Responeded to your comment pre-edit. If the U.S. Government wants to know who is communicating with whom in a world without modern technology, it can hire n government workers to sit at a desk and write down the address information on all the envelopes passing through USPS in a day. Expensive? Yes. Impossible - to the entity that fought WWII, landed on the moon, and continues to maintain a pretty much stable country of 300 million people? No. Our government may suck at cost-efficiency, but it is great at throwing resources at things that scale O(n), like the number of postal workers required to handle n letters. There are good arguments to be made that it's not the government's place to know who is communicating with whom anyway, so it shouldn't be allowed to. If this is the case, than it shouldn't be allowed to by any means. But how does a shopping mall not have the right to watch people move through its store? If it's wrong to watch the EM signals people emit as the move through, then is it also wrong to watch the light they reflect? I've seen employees doing traffic analysis in museums pretty frequently - in fact art museum security guards do it all the time. They could do the same in a mall. They could even park an employee with a clipboard on the second level and map out people's movements between stores below. Focus on one store at a time, find out where all the people leaving that store go. You'd still get the same result - the general trends of how people move around the stores, based on our evolutionary "tracking" ability - the Orwellian step of correlating neural impulses from the eye as belonging to the same object in different positions. Which is exactly what this cell phone tracking system does, except with MAC addresses instead of faces and hairstyles. I say this to emphasize that not all tracking is bad. Correlating different sensory input with past and future inputs is a large part of being human. Hell, in a small town 50 years ago, the general store owner probably knew you and what you've bought before and who your friends are. The post office worker could recognize a scandalous pattern of letters are tell your family about it. That's way more invasive than this. Involvement of machinery is not the difference between good and bad tracking.

joonix 13y ago

So the problem people have with this is the lower cost to the store? They'd be happy with the tracking if the store had to spend more resources to do it? I doubt it.

jevinskie 13y ago
I think the point is they wouldn't stand for it if minders followed them all over the store.
- superuser2 13y ago
  Security personnel undercover as shoppers already exist and are widely deployed to surreptitiously follow suspicious people. We can and do and will continue to stand for it.
  - gradstudent 13y ago
    We stand for it only because the people being tracked are likely to be criminals. We understand that if we do not engage in criminal activity we will very likely not be followed. If my local store started tracking me for no good reason I would go elsewhere.
    - superuser2 13y ago
      >If my local store started tracking me for no good reason You can know that the store uses secret shoppers in general but unless the secret shoppers are terrible at their jobs, you wouldn't know whether or not you're being tracked. Also, doing traffic analysis and strategically placing displays in retail stores has been happening since long before cell phones. Just put someone behind one-way glass, on the mezzanie level of a mall, or even right on the floor with a clipboard.
      - gradstudent 13y ago
        I do not disagree that tracking happens. What I disagree with is your implication that the scale at which it happens is irrelevant. It isn't. A security officer tracking me in a mall or a secret shopper recording my actions constitutes a single data point. Mechanically recording of all my movements within the store by tracking my cell-phone removes entirely all of my anonymity. This kind of stuff is creepy, Orwellian and it can fuck right off.
  - obituary_latte 13y ago
    There is a difference between security personnel (who may be responsible for observing hundreds or thousands of people per shift) and wholesale aggregation, analyzing, and collection of data.

Wingman4l7 13y ago

Which is cheap compared to, say, a private investigator. Not to mention that it scales a lot more easily -- and such data is a lot more fine-grained and more easily manipulated than any report you'd get from a P.I. trailing someone.

superuser2 13y ago
It's okay for them to have the data only if the reporting functionality is poor? What? Either it's private or it's not.

superuser2 13y ago

I've always hated this argument. Banning efficiency, of all things, seems counterproductive. If someone (or a government) really cares, they can simply spend the resources to do full-scale surveillance and tracking the old-fashioned way. It's not like we'll refuse to pay for it, given budgets what they are today. Lack of technology didn't stop the surveillance apparatuses of the USSR or East Germany. They just had larger staffs than we do. Either something is okay, in which case it's okay to do with a machine, or it's not, in which case it's not okay to do at all. If it's okay to tail someone with a police car, it's okay to follow them with a drone. You stop mass surveillance not by making it cost the taxpayer more, but by outlawing mass surveillance and requiring some sort of suspicion or probable cause for each individual case. People who want to track and surveil others like efficiency, but are in general still capable of hard work. Raising the effort required stops only the most pedestrian violators.

obituary_latte 13y ago
Whoa. Once the code is written and so long as the rest of the infrastructure is in place, it can be done wholesale. Cheaply. In perpetuity. To anyone. To do so sans technology requires an undue amount of resource. Ie the energy required to surveil 1x1 personally vs algorithmically is substantial and one is much more feasible than the other (especially if you don't read the TOS - and who does?) All that said, though, I think we are mostly on the same page: you have to accept responsibility for your actions in public. I think where we differ though is that the majority of people don't have a clue wtf is actually going on. PS the argument doesn't hate you. It's willing to take any and all input, process it, and maybe come out changed. It loves, respects, and thrives on you.
- superuser2 13y ago
  Responeded to your comment pre-edit. If the U.S. Government wants to know who is communicating with whom in a world without modern technology, it can hire n government workers to sit at a desk and write down the address information on all the envelopes passing through USPS in a day. Expensive? Yes. Impossible - to the entity that fought WWII, landed on the moon, and continues to maintain a pretty much stable country of 300 million people? No. Our government may suck at cost-efficiency, but it is great at throwing resources at things that scale O(n), like the number of postal workers required to handle n letters. There are good arguments to be made that it's not the government's place to know who is communicating with whom anyway, so it shouldn't be allowed to. If this is the case, than it shouldn't be allowed to by any means. But how does a shopping mall not have the right to watch people move through its store? If it's wrong to watch the EM signals people emit as the move through, then is it also wrong to watch the light they reflect? I've seen employees doing traffic analysis in museums pretty frequently - in fact art museum security guards do it all the time. They could do the same in a mall. They could even park an employee with a clipboard on the second level and map out people's movements between stores below. Focus on one store at a time, find out where all the people leaving that store go. You'd still get the same result - the general trends of how people move around the stores, based on our evolutionary "tracking" ability - the Orwellian step of correlating neural impulses from the eye as belonging to the same object in different positions. Which is exactly what this cell phone tracking system does, except with MAC addresses instead of faces and hairstyles. I say this to emphasize that not all tracking is bad. Correlating different sensory input with past and future inputs is a large part of being human. Hell, in a small town 50 years ago, the general store owner probably knew you and what you've bought before and who your friends are. The post office worker could recognize a scandalous pattern of letters are tell your family about it. That's way more invasive than this. Involvement of machinery is not the difference between good and bad tracking.