The private citizens met a challenge in November of 2009 issued by newscloud journalist Evan Ratliff to locate him in America for a $5000 prize. The prize was claimed by a computer hacker.  The prey was careful to leave generic blog notes which referenced highways, but not specific locations during his travel in an efforts to avoid detection. He quickly shuffled off his “cloudy” coil, by paying cash and hiding his “Fast-Track” road pass so that he would not be easy to find. He doubled back and crossed his own driving path in order to lose anyone who might have been tailing him. He took atypical and circuitous routes to avoid traffic cameras on freeways, highway entrances, or main thoroughfares.

  Meanwhile, as he traveled America briefly avoiding detection, in the corporate board rooms of our nation. power utilities made plans to install home meters which can track not only the common daily, aggregate power usage of a house, but the minute by minute usage; that is to say, usage indexed by specific time and amount of energy used. This sort of data can be analyzed to reveal usage patterns of homeowners and residents. By comparing usage to common patterns related to the demographics of that neighborhood, and of the city and region as a whole, power companies can gain insight as to when people are home, who works or doesn't work and the type of electronics or goods being powered. Looking at cyclical patterns, like daylight and sunset times, weekly patterns like weekdays or weekends, holiday usage, and more, and cross relating these use patterns to their subscriber records, a wider profile of the household can be acquired and sold to third parties who might be interested in such data. Imagine process servers, bill collectors, telemarketers, door-to-door salesmen, landlords and stalkers knowing when you're home and easy to reach.

  Finally, new television sets with built-in web-cameras are available now at big box electronics stores and online. These televisions turn “on” automatically when a person walks into the living room. Voice recognition allows the user to control by speaking without the need to have an infrared device in-hand. However, the webcam works with built-in facial recognition software which is the same sort of system the comes standard as built into newer Dell computers that run Windows 7. The television software can distinguish you from other members of your household, all of whose faces are stored away in it's memory. Once it recognizes you, it tunes to your favorite channel, having stored your viewing preferences for different days and times in it's memory too. This data is shared over the internet as the cable to your TV is also the cable to your internet connection as well as the cable to your video game console of choice, and possibly the same provider as you phone service, and more. Service providers don't need to be the Nielsen Family Ratings firm to know what your watching, when your watching it, what your wearing (or not wearing) while watching it and more. All of this data can be delivered to data-miners who will strip mine you information for all it's worth. Is that a Pepsi on you living room table? Hint: if so, the bar code can be read by optical devices which can then track when and where you bought it. The can connects to your Safeway discount card and gives marketers new ways to plant custom ads into video games that you play, run tailor-made commercials between your shows, or put pop-up ads on your net browser.

  Each story bears a common theme; privacy in the digital age.

   The Tom Cruise character walking through an airport in the future dystopia of Minority Report is greeted by dozens of customize ads on LCD screens. The screen uses iris matching technology, but this same effect can be realized through other methods including facial recognition technology, finger printing technology, passports with RFID chips, id cards, dna analysis, brainwave identification, or the old “psychic”/magician trick of listening to people in an audience who state their own name.

  I have not seen my old coworker “Brandon” in a decade, but he recognized me in a random encounter at a gas station based upon my unique swagger after mere seconds and only a few steps. Certainly my weight loss of over 100 pounds, a new beard and mustache and a clothing makeover to far more casual attire would have made me less recognizable, but his monkey brain processed the signals correctly (unless, as a matter of course he had fixated on me and asked every random stranger if I were his ex-compatriot. I think we can safely assume not.).

  In the instance of the reporter testing anonymity, the things that gave him away were simple and significant. His home location was easy to establish from public records.  His one-time use of his digital brigde pass estalished a direction of travel and with time and location of travel.  His daily blog updates were trackable as to IP address and the location thereof, in addition to the clues he was leaving in the blog itself.  The highways and byways of America are all catalogued, mapped, indexed and categorized as to things like speed limits, roadway conditions, travel times between destinations, weather conditions and more.  Given a few reasonable guesses at some of these variables, he never had a chance to make it much past the Rockies without being spotted.

  Yet, by the same token, abstractors and researchers are specialists in finding information about property or in public records or both. The data that our clients provides is often used by my firm to investigate genealogical history, complete title chains, locate biographical data, and more. As the world becomes increasingly integrated, the tools at my disposal become increasingly powerful. The programs to process facial recognition are now available online. My firm can download FaceBook and MySpace photographs, and compare them with known associates of the profile holders. People of similar names can be included or excluded from consideration based upon face recognition results. Historical photos of ascendants can be compared to their known and suspected progeny.

  This data processing power is growing. Even with a mere city or county refusing to go online or choosing to remove previously online databases from the internet, the daily growth of information technologies more than compensates for such minor setbacks.