“An internet that knows where you are at all time your device is turned on creates opportunities to invade your privacy that goes beyond our wildest fears.”

The problem is the Military already has these, they already have equipment from Naval and Sattelites that can see through buildings, they don’t need “tags” to know where you are. The fact is there are many ways to keep track of you unknowingly and without your knowedge.

Consider, spy equipment, in keyboards, and backdoors in cpu’s and ethernet cards, routers and other devices, that hide the fact that data logged from your keyboard is being sent out over and energy frequency or out over the net that none can detect.

We can’t find the end of privacy we can only create mass false positives, if you haven’t played starcraft at all, you should check the game out just for kicks (evne if you aren’t a gamer), there is a concept called “zerging” where one masses units and sends them to the enemy and overwhelms the enemy.

But ultimately it’s much too late, physics allows for permanent observation from great distances through walls, buildings and whatnot. How do you think the discover underground installations and bunkrs and know where to send nukes?

I really think that the phrase “Wildest fears” apply here – because it would take some serious ignorance to be scared.

For instance. Many privacy advocates rail on about how the NSA and Microsoft and big marketing companies are snooping our connections and gathering data about us. Some other people talk about how all our email is filtered and read, and that actually, there are spies everywhere scratching in our private lives.

The truth, I think, is not far off – but these paranoia-stricken one-sided geeks forget one thing: volume.

I recently read Digital Fortress – by Da Vinci Code’s Dan Brown – and he made a very good point in the book.

It centered around a machine called TRANSLTR – a codebreaker capable of cracking public encryption – such as PGP – in less than 10 minutes a readout.

When one of the lead programmers in the novel questions the head cryptanalist about the power they have for reading everyone’s email anywhere, she replied that “Just because we CAN read everyone’s email, doesn’t mean that we DO.”

Here’s the thing. Every second, the internet is growing. New websites, new pages, new users joining. I’m pretty sure that the Internet sees thousands of petabytes of data transfer every year.

And no matter WHAT manpower you have, keeping track of everyone connected to the Internet is impossible. By the time you have read this comment, there are at least 150 new content provision sites, and at least 500 new Internet users.

You only have to fear the government if you have something to hide. All they’re looking out for is threats to their homeland security.

As for the marketing giants: bring it on. I don’t know about you people, but if a marketing company can target ads on me in such a way that they actually become USEFUL – which is their intention – then I don’t really think I’ll mind.

Because there’s a converse – and that’s the fact that people like me would be able to make use of those services too.

Overall, I think it’s just mass paranoia – the same paranoia with the Y2K bug, for instance. If the Internet is really an invasion of privacy, then just stay off it! Lol.