Mobiles used to surveil shoppers..

Times Online: "Customers in shopping centres are having their every move tracked by a new type of surveillance that listens in on the whisperings of their mobile phones.

The technology can tell when people enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there, and what route they take as they walked around.

The device cannot access personal details about a person’s identity or contacts, but privacy campaigners expressed concern about potential intrusion should the data fall into the wrong hands."


Seems like this would be easy enough to correlate with time-coded surveillance video on premises... Speaking of which, aren't they already doing this with the cameras?

Windows Vista streams personal data to Microsoft

Softpedia: "Are you using Windows Vista? Then you might as well know that the licensed operating system installed on your machine is harvesting a healthy volume of information for Microsoft. In this context, a program such as the Windows Genuine Advantage is the last of your concerns. In fact, in excess of 20 Windows Vista features and services are hard at work collecting and transmitting your personal data to the Redmond company. "

So on the plus side, Microsoft is pretty open about the fact that they're watching you - although we'd wager that most Vista users are utterly unaware that a steady stream of personal info is phoning home. Is it a spyware OS? Maybe. Maybe not. We're not using it, so we don't really care.

The real question is "who does your computer, your property, serve? You, or others?"

Now even the ads are watching us...

Wired: "The eyebox2 from xuuk is a palm-size video camera surrounded by infrared light-emitting diodes. It can record eye contact with 15-degree accuracy at a distance of up to 33 feet. A simple glance from a passerby scores an impression, providing a tally that enables new Google-like measurement metrics that real-world advertisers could only dream about until recently."


Peachy.

Step 1. Aquire ad companies. Step 2. Wholesale surveillance. Step 3. Profit.

Interesting duo-fecta of announcements this week from two competing retardo-level market cap companies in the computing world. Both Micro$oft and Google have acquired ad-serving companies that extend reach beyond their own properties - and curiously, both have plans to do the deep cross-property profiling of individuals and their online activities.


From the Financial Times, on Google's 'do no evil' plan: "Google’s ambition to maximise the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off. Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand... Fears have been stoked by the potential for Google to build up a detailed picture of someone’s behaviour by combining its records of web searches with the information from DoubleClick’s “cookies”, the software it places on users’ machines to track which sites they visit."


From New Scientist on Micro$oft's continued push to assimilation: "If you thought you could protect your privacy on the web by lying about your personal details, think again. In online communities at least, entering fake details such as a bogus name or age may no longer prevent others from working out exactly who you are. That is the spectre raised by new research conducted by Microsoft. The computing giant is developing software that could accurately guess your name, age, gender and potentially even your location, by analysing telltale patterns in your web browsing history. But experts say the idea is a clear threat to privacy - and may be illegal in some places."


Spiffy. Inescapable pervasive wholesale surveillance, by Micro$oft, Google, the federal government, and ISPs.. Let the countdown to investigative subpoenas begin? Pleh. Time to start a new internet. This one's been infected.

Mobile phones as physical 'cookies'.. another reason to disable Bluetooth...

New Scientist: "A public advertising screen tailors the ads it shows by monitoring the Bluetooth gadgets being carried by its nearby audience, and avoids repeating the same ad to the same person where possible.

The display detects the presence of devices fitted with Bluetooth wireless transmitters carried by people walking past, such as cellphones and PDAs. Software agents then 'bid' against one another to determine which adverts are then shown to those viewers."

"As each passing device has a unique Bluetooth signal, this enables the screen to identify different individuals passing by. It builds a record of the adverts those people have been previously been shown to make sure messages are not repeated."


Yech. And this is good because...? Isn't the point of annoying, intrusive advertising to beam itself into your consciousness through repetition anyway? Why would an advertiser only want one impression? (confused)... And why on earth would normal people want to voluntarily provide profile information to allow 'targeted' ads to be bounced at them in public spaces?

The genius move for some MIT wonk would be to modify 'augmented reality' glasses to include adblockers that replace advertising in public spaces with pictures of puppies or something...