All that happens will be known.

"All that happens will be known."

The motto of quite-obviously-supposed-to-be-Google tech behemoth The Circle in Dave Eggers book of the same name was probably supposed to be a warning rather than a portent. As technology marches forward, driven by the unlimited cash of governments and venture capital, coupled to the egos of amoral entreprenuers who believe that their twisted intepretations of 'useful' always trump what the rest of us consider to be 'right', we're not just over the edge of a privacy cliff, we're about to hit the rocks below.

The number of times we're tracked daily is truly staggering. We're on CCTV in most high-streets and chain-stores. We're on traffic cameras on every major road. Number plate readers build profiles of who drives where, when, and how fast on every motorway. Who and when we text and telephone our friends is tracked by our mobile phone providers. Where we go with our phones is logged too, with metadata about which cell phone masts can 'see' our phones being recorded. In the online world what web pages we view, what email we send, what we buy and what we share is recorded on the servers of our ISPs, social networks and retail websites. Those little snippets of data are catalogued, cross-references, and built in to amazingly detailed and insightful associations accessible by any company with enough money to buy our records.

The shear scale of the databases involved are staggering - the number plate reading database used by the police stores as many as 35,000,000 records a day.

Companies such as data giant Acxiom make millions of pounds every year tying together our web footprint with our public record - your online activity is intrinsically linked to your credit cards, bank records, retail loyalty cards and, if you're unfortunate enough to live in a country that doesn't make it illegal, your tax and employment records.

It doesn't stop there.

Playing with your own data.

The power of data isn't just for the companies that want to track us all. We have as much access to tracking as they do if we use the tools available.

A powerful Android phone app is available called Tasker (£2.99). With it you can build 'tasks' that do things in given circumstances. For example, I created a task that logs the Cell Tower ID of the mobile phone mast that my phone is connected to every two minutes. I built another that logs the location of the phone every 5 minutes. To save battery power each of the tasks only run when there are headphones plugged in - a sure sign that I'm out and about somewhere.

That wasn't nearly enough though, so I added a log of the mobile phone signal strength too. And mapped that against the metro times for my commute.

That's just scratching the surface of what an app like Tasker can do with the amazing range of data available on today's devices. More about that in a later blog post.

PS. If you're on iOS, try IFTTT instead. It's not as good, but it's getting better.

Whenever you walk past a wifi access point that's enabled with software from a range of mobile device tracking and analytics companies, notably the likes of UK-based Path Intelligence and US-based Euclid Analytics, your phone connects to it to see if there is an available network. That connection is logged with your phone's MAC address, a 12 digit number that identifies it uniquely.

This log is extremely useful on it's own. A retailer knows that one of the devices in the store at the time was owned by whoever made a transaction at that same time. After a few transactions it'll be obvious that the owner of Debit Card X is also the owner Mobile Phone 123. From that point on, if you just pop in to browse or if you make a purchase with cash they will still know that you visited the store, at what time, and for how long. Their profile of you is exceptionally detailed.

That's even before the retailers start sharing your data.

Going beyond a mere silo for each retailer and letting other businesses see their data on your shopping habits Tesco can discover that you go to Nandos and the cinema every Friday evening before you go in to their store for your shopping on Saturday, so they could have an advert for DVDs and spicy food ready and waiting. River Island can tell that you always pop in after going to Starbucks for an hour, but and that you make a sneaky visit to Debenhams if you've not bought anything from them. The discount voucher you receive in their next sale could be a little less generous if you've been buying from the enemy.

And if retailers are interested in sharing, why wouldn't other access point owners? Across every major city there are free wifi hotspots for urban internet projects, innoculous little boxes attached to lampposts and signage. Walk past one and your phone will dutifully report your location to the cloud, and on to anyone who wants to buy in to that data. The eye of tracking sees beyond the shop doorway and extends, well, everywhere. All in the name of providing useful services, but whose utility isn't entirely in favour of the consumer.

Furthermore, it's not simply your habits that are important to those who would keep watch over you. By looking at which phone IDs appear in locations at the same time it's easy to build a social graph of who shops with whom. If you go shopping with your boyfriend, go to the pub with your friends, pop out for lunch with your colleagues, each of those relationships can be discerned from your mobile phone data just by looking at which phone goes to different locations with which other phone.

The things that businesses can do with this data is fantastically powerful.

If you're of the tin-foil-hat-wearing persuasion there much more to worry about. A UK patent for sewing RFID tags in to children's school uniforms was granted a few years ago, though it's not yet in apparent use anywhere. Privacy scientists at a number of universities have demonstrated proof-of-concept tracking of sports tracking devices, car tyres, and even working out what TV show you're watching by how much electricity your house is using. It seems that if the data is available and unique, it can be used to track what you're doing and wearing you're doing it.

Some don't believe this is an issue.

Some people are happy to share the data that these providers reap each minute. They'll even go so far as to add to it by attaching devices to themselves to increase the amount of data they share on purpose. The quantified self movement, and it's partner in crime that goes under the banner of 'life logging' is a relatively new phenomenon.

Companies such as Narrative build tiny devices that clip on to your clothes and snap a relatively high resolution image every thirty seconds, tag it with your current location, and store it away to upload to their cloud services later. When you connect the device to a computer all your pictures are collated and neatly plotted on a map. As their marketing literature notes, you never need to miss anything again. You can be in the moment without fiddling with a camera. You can rest assured that you have a record of everything that happens to you just in case.

There's no good reason to believe that Narrative have any goal outside of their stated objective to make our memories of things better. That said though, they could do some very powerful analytics of the data people are only to willing to pay them to take.

A simple object- and facial-recognition application could track who you're with, when you're with them, where you were, even what you were doing. For a service that had access to a snapshot worth of data about you every thirty seconds, they could paint an incredibly detailed picture of your life.

Whether or not we'll all end up as "the transparent man" of Eggers' Circle is an unknown. In the novel this guy streams his entire life to the cloud and to his 'Circle page' timeline for everyone to see. The notion driving his choice is transparency - he wants people to see that he is open, honest, and above scrutiny. In the book, in one of the less believable twists, a politician follows suit. Predictably enough, more and more politicians "go transparent" as the public questions what they're hiding if they don't. Certainly there are some who would welcome the possibility of sharing every moment of their life.

That's worrying for those of us who would rather not be tracked. Privacy is rarely an private thing - to remain unwatched you need the people you're around not to watch you. Governments and corporations can be limited by legal statute (although whether that's enough to actually stop them is a whole different question), but if the people you want to be around are willingly surveilling you, telling the world where you are and what you're doing, there is very little you can do about it. Besides, perhaps, not hanging out with those people any more. Is the benefit of life-logging so valuable that we want to live in a world where some of us have weigh our friendships against our desire for privacy?

Whether or not the constant monitoring of us all is actually a bad thing or not is a matter of opinion. Fears of what future fantasy fascists would be able to do with this vast pool of data be damned, there is no doubt that these services that use our data are useful. Facebook's social graph presents us with real insights about our social groups. It enables us to connect with friends and family in ways that are hard to give up. Google's tracking data means that we don't have to be assailed with the lowest common denominator in adverts - ads could transcend marketing and become informative if advertisers wanted them that way. Number plate recognition helps track down fleeing criminals. A Narrative Clip helps us be in the moment. And so on. The end of privacy isn't necessarily the end of liberty - it's a simply change to the status quo. But that change must be on our terms. Left to that whims of corporations and governments the end of privacy will mean living under a spotlight with no escape even if we want it. We should not be so willing to give up the choice to go untracked.

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