The U.S. government and its corporate allies are looking out for you--literally--with surveillance tools intended to identify you, track your whereabouts, monitor your activities and allow or restrict your access to people, places or things deemed suitable by the government. This is all the more true as another invasive technology, the iris scanner, is about to be unleashed on the American people.
Since this is as non-invasive as public cameras, I suspect nothing will stop this from taking place. You may be able to opt out using it as an id, but when you are in public, you could be tracked like you currently are with video cameras, only this is orders of magnitude more effective since it can easily tie into databases. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. This will allow us to be even more suspicious of anyone wearing dark glasses.....
During the past four years, the company has spent tens of millions of dollars to develop and deploy a series of core--but expandable--technologies built around identity management solutions. Global Rainmakers has worked with the Pentagon, U.S. Air Force and the Department of Homeland Security, as well as banking and financial services companies such as Bank of America. The company was founded by Chairman and CEO Hector Hoyos and Keith Hanna, D.Phil., Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President.
Everyone imagines a government that forcibly wrests our rights from us. What we have instead is a populace that happily relinquishes them because it's convenient and they "have nothing to hide." We have many of these taking place- look at the attempts to replicate the Great Firewall of China right here in the US. This will most likely succeed as well.
An interesting aspect of this is what right is being violated? Privacy? What is a reasonable expectation of privacy in public places? Not much, so it seems that this technology does not cross the line into violating our privacy rights.
I do find this development disconcerting and very 1984. It does seem that a more expanded notion of "public privacy" will need to be developed if wide scale public use of this technology is to be prevented. I do not see that happening.
Now movement is a different matter isn't it. The recording of where you are in public is currently not a privacy issue is it? Otherwise traffic and other public cameras as well as bank and private cameras could not record your presence. However, with the new technology and with cause - all your movements can be legally tracked - in retrospect. It would seem like a database of time stamp/location records would not take too much storage space. With cause as determined by authorities, people have few rights.
