I've been getting around on public transit for quite a long time, but have been thinking of getting a car.
Now I've decided not to.
I'm a generally law-abiding citizen, but I simply do not wish to be tracked. How would you feel were someone to follow you around everywhere you went? Even if they kept their distance, never spoke to you our overtly harmed you in any way, it would be very disturbing.
Not to mention the huge incentives (>50% discount) for using a traceable RFID card as your "ticket" instead of paying with cash.
[0] http://boingboing.net/2009/08/31/london-bus-with-16-c.html from 2009 - newer buses, e.g. the 2012 "new" routemaster may well have more.
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspon... from 2007.
I'm never leaving my house ever again.
Now sit down here like a good little citizen and watch this lovely entertaining "programming" we have for you - and don't forget to buy some of the products we show you too - you know you need them really. ;)
As I recall it wasn't doing actual facial recognition, but object / shape recognition, and comparing the objects in an area over time. So you'd have the outline of a person sitting on a bench and if they're still there after all destinations served by that platform (obviously depending on the line) have had at least one train, it'd be flagged up as suspicious as apparently some jumpers like to contemplate first.
Of course there must be a fair few false positives - people waiting to meet friends to either travel together or head out maybe etc, heck - I've even met someone to buy a laptop on a tube platform before... and I don't know how well it would cope if the person moved about between trains - but that didn't seem to matter much for their use case, and I'm sure they must have better tech in place by now.
Sorry I can't be more precise with a source, but I'll let you know if I find anything helpful.
Then you can ride the exact same route every day at exactly the same time wearing the same high visibility clothing that you wear every day, decorated 'Christmas tree' style in flashing lights. Just to make things easier for those that might track you, cruise along at 10-20 miles per hour, obeying the Highway Code every inch of the way.
Ah, but what about the mobile phone? You don't need that turned on whilst cycling. In fact, if you are used to babysitting the battery it makes sense to turn it off just for practicality reasons.
Ah, but what about the CCTV? Look at the route options, there is bound to be a park or canal tow path to take and, as well as a nice car-free ride you get to expose yourself to far fewer CCTV operators, although total CCTV absence is unlikely. Even then though, options are pretty good. You might take that 'winter warmer' coat off part way through your route. Or that bright yellow jacket is kind of ubiquitous, 'hard to spot' amongst the hordes of other cyclists with the same jacket. You can also legitimately completely cover your face with mask, sunglasses and helmet.
Even listening for a cyclist is not exactly easy, particularly if you don't let that tell-tell freewheel announce your presence (keep pedalling).
In not one film in the entire history of Hollywood has the bad guy/good guy evaded getting caught due to the simple tactic of riding a bicycle at a leisurely pace. So there just isn't even the group-think out there to suspect the cyclist.
Nobody expects the cyclist!
Also, I didn't claim that surveillance was the primary reason for oyster cards, but there is no doubt it also functions as an effective large surveillance network.
As for other cities, transport isn't as centralised as it is in London so is vastly harder to implement, but for sure others are looking into similar schemes.
In NL they do everything possible to avoid you buying the cards with cash (and there is a surcharge for disposables).
Also, like with most things these days, we're sold on the convenience that registering adds i.e. no loss of funds if lost or stolen, and "auto top up" from your registered credit / debit card... most people don't care enough to pay an extra GBP5 to make their transport history "disappear" every so often - especially when there are so many other ways we're tracked.
And now they actually accept debit cards directly at the gates without even the oyster cards.
If someone tries, of course they can pay cash and they can change up cards. But the point isn't that it's impossible to avoid surveillance, but that we are in a surveillance state which you have to try hard enough to avoid that avoidance is a red flag in itself.
On the Web, this happens already (try a browser add-on such as RequestPolicy which will show you the numerous sites that track you all over the Web - often 20 or more per page).
127.0.0.1 hosted-pixel.com 127.0.0.1 cdn.hosted-pixel.com
When web bugs first appeared, there was a huge public outcry. Now that they call it "analytics" or "big data" everyone seems cool with it.
However I can't block everything with hosts; some of the tracking scripts come from the same hosts as I actually use. I'm planning to write a firefox addon which will do stuff like remove the Facebook "Like" buttons. Even if I don't click the button, Facebook knows that it served me the script.
||twitter.$domain=~twitter.com
||twitter.$domain=~twitter.com|~another.comYou can stop a lot of trackers by minimizing referer leaks. Firefox has the config option network.http.sendRefererHeader which defaults to 2, "always send referer." 1=same FQDN, 0=never send. So by setting it to 0 or 1, a typical tracker that's gotten past your /etc/hosts entries, adblock, etc. will see you requesting their pixel image but never see the sites that initiated those HTTP GETs.
There are no silver bullets, just good tools, and reducing the referer footprint is one of them.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/policeman/
Or on Github for a more bleeding-edge version
[^1]: https://github.com/futpib/policeman/issues/28 Plus issues 92 and 95.
So, I went ahead and created a wiki for this: https://github.com/UprootLabs/gngr/wiki/List-of-request-bloc...
If there are any known issues with RPContinued or there are other extensions that are not listed, please feel free to add them. Thanks.
The extensions which have a switchboard like interface enable the user to block requests based on the request's domain name, the primary frame's domain-name, and also the type of request.
In contrast, extensions like NoScript have a global switch. If I allow scripts from DontBeEvil.com, they are enabled on all domains. They don't prevent XSS attacks, for example.
If there's a better name for this concept, please do suggest one.
It generates massive value that everybody benefits from. People appreciate that.
I just wonder how much of the set of "analytics" that requires involving 3rd parties (web bugs and other referrer tricks) is actually useful and a value. The set that is a value "that everybody benefits from" is going to be even smaller.
I'm sure most people want this data, and see a lot of potential use. Usually, there is a big difference between "want" and "need", and I suspect a lot of the current attitude that throws analytics on everything is some experimentation, a limited amount of real value, and a whole lot of people joining in because they can (fad, bandwagon effect, it's what a tutorial said, etc).
I am completely cool with someone analyzing their own logs if I visit their site. What I'm not cool with, is them finding out what _other_ sites I visit.
I regard the current focus on analytics as unduly obsessive. How much do you need to know about your customer to flog your products? Just because you can measure something, it doesn't mean that it's going to do anyone any good to measure it.
I used to do direct mail; all we ever did was what today is known as A/B testing - we'd send "test drops" to different lists, with different prices, different wording in the offer letters and so on. It worked really well.
As you mention, I'm more concerned with tracking as a 3rd-party[1]. There is, obviously, at least some real benefit in these cases that would not be possible when only using server logs. It's probably a lot less than most people think. A lot of that data (or similar-enough data when measured in e.g. how much it benefits sales or makes marketing cheaper) can probably be found elsewhere.
If we knew what the core benefits (needs, not wants), we might (in an ideal world) even be able to have some sort of social negotiation where the data can be provided in some form (or an alternative, or by making sure the real social cost is covered properly).
[1] While the law currently doesn't work this way, involving a 3rd-party unauthorized should really be considered some new type of (criminal) wiretapping in states that require 2-party consent.
If you can find equivalent data somewhere else, you should go build a company around this. People built their products this way because it works. If you have a better idea then you should make it happen.
The degree of focus that this permits is how startups and small companies can find and target their market quickly, where a large company could just market to everybody and see who responds. It's hard to tell how much of the tech startup boom has been driven by this, but after working for and with a few of them, third party analytics is critical because you usually don't have the time or money to find your market without it. Before we had analytics the strategy was "make a lucky guess and verify it before you run out of money". Now the default strategy is "measure who is interested and go directly to them".
I'll accept that large, successful companies don't really get much out of this sort of thing - they already know who buys their product, and have the scale and resources to target everybody. They probably do use analytics just because it's there, and not because they need to.
Also, In England we have CCTV on the buses. I'll take a photo next time I get a bus but there are about 5 cameras on the top deck.
However, women don't generally have beards, so I expect that facial recognition is more effective at identifying them than us men.
I suffer from paranoia myself. I've been thinking for more than twenty-five years about how to handle this and the only thing I can come up with is that we must make our control systems good or devolve into some nightmare scenario.
I have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder. It's much like being manic-depressive and schizophrenic at the same time. One of the schizophrenic symptoms is paranoia; if the paranoia gets bad enough, I have visual hallucinations as well.
Having all this surveillance going on, even to the extent I am assured they're not looking for me, makes my illness far worse.
It doesn't help to take more medicine.
I would be very interested to see a comparison of psychiatric hospitalization rates from before and after Snowden's disclosures. It's not hard to get such statistics but it would be some work to interpret them meaningfully.