Your property is on the internet. Your house can be seen from the sky and zoomed in on, down to the street level. I know this because I found my birth brother recently, and before I ever contacted or met him, I knew what his house and car looked like. I (correctly) inferred that the minivan he drove was used to take care of his ill adoptive mother and not for kids, as no toys or bumper stickers indicating children were readily visible. This is a lesson for other in what your home and car can say about you.
A few dollars to a private investigation firm, and those with MVTRAC-style technolgy will turn over a list of all places where a car has been spotted. This is the same tech that allows police to drive along a street and automatically run license plate numbers as they cruise. It is a technolgy which has now made it's way into civilian hands and is being used by everyone from skip tracers to repo men to credit agencies to bounty hunters and more.
While Europe is trying to regulate Google street views, no oversight is being contemplated for MVTRAC data miners. It's the wild west. Unless you park in a covered garage or put a protective tarp over your car, your vehicle is subject to being spotted and catalogued. In cases where you license is misread and indexed wrongly, putting you at the scene of a murder, don't worry. You have no legal recourse or rights and will likely be convicted of a crime that you were miles from and in bed asleep while it occurred. You will have a warm jail cell and three square meals to survive daily with free shankings and prison rape while awaiting old sparky.
The ability to track OJ Simpson with a cell phone call from the back of a bronco has obviously been around for many years. The ability to identify car license plates (on clear days) with satellites has been around for a few years. The tracking of people and vehicles in police investigations using private security cameras was highlighted after the Oklahoma City bombing. The ability to track people using automatic toll payments was demonstrated in the case of a man who committed murder having crossed the Golden Gate Bridge using a FastTrack pass for automatic toll payment. Cell towers used by cell phones used to locate a family tragically lost for days in snowey Oregon mountains. Credit card use, debit card use, buyers clubs cards (Costco, Safeway, other markets, etc...) are ongoing and long standing in their use. Even individual dollar bills can be tracked by serial numbers on the web, by chemical traces left on them, by finge tr prints affixed to them and when passing through metal detectors base on the metalic security strip embedded in them. How much money is in your pocket is not even a secret.
Consider that your face is identifiable based on the proportions of jawline and chin to nose, etc.... All of these are mathematical computations that, when taken in context of GPS locators on your cell phone, the unique print of your retinal patterns and your behaviors that can be deduced from your online profiles, can absolutely identify you throughout your life. Add in the public records for land ownership, property tax rolls, assessed property rolls, voter records, business filings and professional licenses, and you have a simple forumla for knowing anything about anyone. Check out your own email use on RapLeaf to see what I mean about finding information easily about people.
I say this from experience. Before I met or corresponded with my eldest biological sister, I knew her and her husbands' jobs, annual income, home value, interests, medical conditions, and my nephew's Facebook information, my nephew's school, my sister's adoptive nuclear families' jobs and interests, her yearbook photo, names of her childhood friends and more. If you don't think that this intially freaked her out, you'd be very wrong. None-the-less, following my honesty is the best policy virtue, I was open and clear with her and we have had a wonderful time together, meeting our other three siblings, including the brother I mentioned at the start of this blog entry.
Points to consider: your privacy is in your own hands, so exercise and assert your right to it all the time, every time and in every way, or don't blame others if it's compromised.