With revelations that the National Security Agency has collected some 20 trillion phone calls and emails via an expansive nationwide
surveillance network, most Americans have already come to the realization that
everything they do is being monitored.
But many shrug
off Big Brother’s prying eyes by suggesting that, since they aren’t doing
anything wrong, they have nothing to worry about.
That may have been true several years ago, but the digital surveillance systems of today are far more
advanced than most people understand. No longer are these machines simply
recording the data and storing them in some historical archive to be pulled at a
later date should the government ever have reason to take a closer look at your
personal life.
The next generation of systems are
being used to actively monitor your digital interactions, surfing
habits, conversations and daily sentiment in an effort to predict
your future behavior. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the systems
currently operating within the social media sphere.
Researchers at the University of Virginia
funded by the U.S. Army recently
demonstrated that they can not only gather information from your personal
Twitter account just like the NSA, but also aggregate and analyze that
information with advanced predictive algorithms designed to determine what
you’re going to do next. In this case, the researches focused specifically on predicting crime by individuals, as well as in crime
“hot spots” around the country.
Here’s the kicker. The algorithms being used don’t just look
for obvious keyword phrases associated with criminal activity like “I’m going to
kill you” or “meet me later and we’ll give him a beat down,” but focus in on
routine activities, geo-location, and aggregate historical information to
calculate the chance of a particular individual being involved in a crime at
some point in the future.
Source