Technology Author: Otis Internet

Truth can be stranger than fiction, especially in this rapid technological world we are living in. Most of us take full advantage of the mobile internet that has been such a help in simplifying our lives.

But what if there were powers that existed to track our every move, through wireless Internet, as we go through our days? Sounds like a scary sci-fi book to me. The question is why would these powers be tracking our actions and what will they do with the information.

Let your imagination wander for a minute. You go to work at a certain time each day, stop at the grocery store to get food for dinner, drive a regular route home, walk your dog when you get home while talking on your mobile internet device. Then you go to a movie after dinner.

If there was a system to track your daily activities imagine how easy it would be to market certain products and services to you. Companies and businesses could time their instant ads to you through the wireless mobile internet network at just the right minute that you could be the most open to purchase what they have to sell.

Does this send chills down your spine? I mean, after all, what about our privacy? There is a nascent industry that originates with Google and Nokia that is working on this exact kind of a system right now. I don't think they are as concerned with our privacy concerns as they are with how to maximize the information that they already have about us and our living and spending habits.

We might want to hide our heads in the sand and not believe this is reality but we dare not. We want the benefits of modern technology like mobile wireless internet and high internet speed. But there can be a dangerous side to some of the technologies available.

Our future privacy rights and lifestyles will be significantly affected by what is going on right now at the start up companies organizing and assessing the information that is being gathered as I write this. This isn't a conspiracy rumor trumped up to add excitement to our routine lives. This is real stuff, happening now.

Recently, in a SoHo neighborhood at one of these start ups that track people's daily activities, called Sense Networks, analysts were evaluating the actions of almost four million cell phone users during the previous year.

These human guinea pigs were tracked by global positioning systems (gps), WiFi networks in their areas, or by cell towers catching their signals. These people do not have names to the analysts, they are just blips on Sense's info radar screen. Sense will not diverge where they are getting their data trove from.

We will discuss this more in future articles. How can we use our enjoyable mobile internet devices without endangering our personal privacy and security? When things are moving at warp speed, as they are, we must stay informed. We need to know all we can in this rapid technological world we live in.

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