For the past 50-60 years, you've had satellites flying overhead that can track your every move. :
Then why do you even leave the house?
If you're a person who thinks the world is all about you, then you stay inside. Great life, that.
If the Gumm'int wanted to follow you, they've had the ability to do that since long before satellites. They'd just assign a team of people with vehicles and other equipment to stake you out.
I'm going to make up some numbers to illustrate a point (and because I don't know the real numbers):
Let's assume that it takes a team of ten people to effectively follow someone 24/7, logging and reporting their movements to...someone else. Behind that team are the equivalent of another 10 people, interpreting that information, managing the various personnel and their equipment, doing the bookwork, and all the other things that keep the project going. That's a 20-1 ratio of trackers to trackee. And that leaves out all of those who'd need to be involved to arrest, torture, incarcerate you and otherwise make your life miserable.
Again, I've made up the numbers, but I think they're reasonable. If you actually know the correct numbers, enlighten us.
But modern technology makes it all easy, doesn't it?
Technology can eliminate those first 10 people, the ones out in the street, but it can't eliminate most of the rest. And you still need people to operate and maintain the technology. So let's drop the with-technology tracker/trackee ratio to 8:1.
How many people does the U.S. government employ? About 22 million. (Let's assume that your state and local governments don't care where you go.)
78% of the U.S. population, about 250 million people, are older than 18. Tracking that toddler may be fun, but it isn't very productive.
So,
if each and every U.S. government employee i.e. every social worker, park ranger, military, lawyer, office worker, elected representative, astronaut etc. was involved FULL TIME doing or supporting citizen surveillance, they could track at most 2.75 million people, about 1-in-9.
I doubt that the meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center do much citizen surveillance in the offseason, so let's look at the intelligence agencies.
The NSA employs about 20,000 people, the FBI about 35,000. So together they could theoretically track about 7,000 people. The CIA supposedly is restricted to non-US operations, but even their 20,000-odd would add only about 2,500 to the total, so let's include them, too. All-up, our security agencies, if they did nothing else, could track about
4 people out of every 100,000.
How important do you think YOU are?
What people fail to realize about data mining is that it's all about groups and probabilities, not individual observation. You "like" cat pictures, so you're more likely to be receptive to an ad for upholstery cleaner than to one for shotguns. But it's far from precise or direct. We're talking about response rate differences that range from several percentage points down to small fractions of one percent.
In the end, it's all about not wasting advertising money that's spread over millions of impressions, not about your individual lifestyle. When you think that big business doesn't care about you, you're right. And you should be happy about that.
Data security is a whole different matter. The fact is that all of our life-critical information today is stored on the computers of those who provide us with related services, and we are at the mercy of their systems to keep our data from becoming exposed. The sad fact is that there is no completely secure system, and there never will be.
