IBM is
currently putting together database and barcode tracking to allow farmers and grocers in China to track your porkchop, from the pig to the plate. Using supply chain tracking (similar to what is done already in other industries), the goal is to limit and hopefully prevent disease outbreaks by tracking the health of the animal, including which other animals it has come into contact with. So the next time you sit down for some nice ham, you might be able to scan the barcode (or RFID tag) to see whom else on your block shares your own porcine six degrees of separation.
[more inside]
posted by Old'n'Busted
on Dec 19, 2011 -
21 comments
Collusion is a firefox add-on that visualizes in real-time which data collection companies track you across different websites on the web and what they're learning about you.
Atul Varma describes
how this project came about. Safari meanwhile has
ghostery, an extension that gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity.
[more inside]
posted by krautland
on Jul 25, 2011 -
17 comments
The Wall Street Journal investigates web snoops. The 50 sites installed a total of 3,180 tracking files on a test computer used to conduct the study. Only one site, the encyclopedia Wikipedia.org, installed none. Twelve sites, including IAC/InterActive Corp.'s Dictionary.com, Comcast Corp.'s Comcast.net and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN.com, installed more than 100 tracking tools apiece in the course of the Journal's test. [more inside]
posted by chavenet
on Jul 30, 2010 -
59 comments
Make your own attack ad. The Democratic party is uploading all its "tracker" videos of the top Republican candidates out on the campaign trail, for use by anyone for anything. "The party hopes that thousands of eyes might find something the mainstream media has missed, or that a new way of juxtaposing the video with something else will be revealing about the candidates," says
the NYT. Gimmick or political sea change?
posted by CunningLinguist
on Nov 28, 2007 -
60 comments
Trackulous - Track Anything. There have to be ten dozen ways to
track your weight online. MeFi users track thteir social athletic accomplishments at
WeEndure and
Runner+. But what if we wanted to track (and graph) Javelinas Sighted, Cookies Tossed, Fights with Boyfriend, or any other user-defined numerical quantity over time? And what if we wanted to share our statistics with our friends? For that,
Trackulous - a simple, elegant, mobile-friendly web tool.
posted by ikkyu2
on Nov 19, 2007 -
19 comments
Wiki City Rome - "
anyone with an Internet connection will be able to see a unique map of the Italian capital that shows the movements of crowds, event locations, the whereabouts of well-known Roman personalities, and the real-time position of city buses and trains."
posted by Gyan
on Sep 7, 2007 -
3 comments
Surreptitious cell phone stalking tracking. Stalkers are no longer limited to just your call history. For a small fee and with a few minutes access to her cell phone the author was able to track his girlfriend's cell phone location within a hundred yards or so and the cell phone provides no trace that it was happening.
Traceamobile.com appears to be one site offering such a service.
Mologogo was discussed here previously but does not appear to be surreptitious. (Appears to be limited to UK for right now.)
posted by caddis
on Feb 4, 2006 -
21 comments
Noted in the live stream from this TV station This is the "Local2 News" live tv stream (which has been pointed to in three previous MeFi threads about other news stories.
Currently they've from time to time been showing storm track predictive models (which they say are their own development).
I'd rather have pointers to more models than the TV station's occasional glimpses, but, this is the most varied set of storm track predictions I've seen. Anyone know where they're getting them?
posted by hank
on Sep 22, 2005 -
24 comments
RFID to track students in Spring, Texas... the information is fed automatically by wireless phone to the police and school administrators. That's right: constant and continual monitoring of all the schoolkids in the district by the local police department.
posted by Irontom
on Nov 17, 2004 -
74 comments
(linked page needs Java, sorry) Victor Wooten's
Bass and Nature Camp sounds interesting. Bass guitar and music master class in the woods, with animal tracking, meditation, health, and basic wilderness survival lessons.
posted by crunchburger
on Jun 5, 2004 -
6 comments
Asteroid orbits Enter the designation or name of any asteroid or comet, and a 3D orbit visualization tool will appear for that object.
If Chicken Little had this link he might have calmed down a little. Or not...Find out if your favorite asteroid is about to rock your world.
posted by konolia
on Sep 2, 2003 -
5 comments
Postal ID Plan A government report urges the U.S. Postal Service to create "smart stamps" to track the identity of people who send mail.
[more inside]
posted by Irontom
on Aug 13, 2003 -
20 comments
Riddle me this: why are so many people in such a hurry to monitor, record and analyze every aspect of modern life? A UCLA professor wants to
outfit an entire first grade classroom with minuscule sensors. The National Science Foundation awarded $1.8 million to fund the study, which will see students wearing special caps tracking their location and what they're looking at while cameras and microphones will record their activities. All the data gathered will be processed by a data-mining software package.
[more inside]
posted by Irontom
on Aug 4, 2003 -
24 comments
Michelin plans to embed trackable microchips in tires. The US tire manufacturer has begun testing
electronic transponders that are "strictly for identification and tracking. " Congress passed the
TREAD Act (Transportation, Recall, Enhancement, Accountability and Documentation) in response to the massive recall of Firestone tires on Ford Explorers and requires tire makers to more closely track their tires. Is this a legitimate use of technology, or does it present another opportunity to erode privacy? [
Via /.]
posted by maniactown
on Jan 22, 2003 -
24 comments
Santa Claus, elusive jolly old elf, has finally been located by someone curious enough (in both senses of the word) to use FedEx to track him down. (The page I linked to here only tells half the story; click that link down on the left to get FedEx's tracking page.)
posted by wanderingmind
on Dec 6, 2002 -
20 comments
BlogTree.com is a blog genealogy site: "You can register your blogs and record which blogs inspired their creation." It's an interesting new way to catalog and find blogs in tandem with Blogdex's
social network explorer. Which blogs inspired you to start your own blog and have you in turn inspired anyone else to blog? The favorite blogs thread was a long time ago so those of you who've had blogs for years, which new(ish) blogs inspire you to continue blogging now? [ via
Blogroots ]
posted by lia
on Aug 4, 2002 -
23 comments
The
Global Positioning System is now commonly used for navigation in hundreds of ways worldwide. Some
very innovative things are now being done with the system beyond simply finding out where you are. However, according to
this BBC story, "emerging applications are being hampered by concerns that information from the global satellite network, which is run by the United States, could be switched off or restricted in the event of a security threat." Am I the only one worried about what will happen to all the hikers, rescue services, ships, small planes and geeks that would suffer if the network is switched off?
posted by Gamecat
on Mar 16, 2002 -
12 comments
Virgin Mobile Phone Records Which Map Users Whereabouts Kept Indefinitely. Admittedly, this data is only accurate to within a few hundred metres at the moment, but '
When the new breed of 3G - third generation - phones comes on stream, probably next year, they will enable the users' location to be pinpointed to within a couple of metres'. I know the current climate is increasingly pro-identity cards, pro-police state, but this can't be right, surely? Why do they want to keep this information indefinitely?
posted by boneybaloney
on Oct 30, 2001 -
15 comments
A web buck! We got a web buck the other day! No, it's not some kind of ecommerce thing. It's a good ole' dollar bill doing something of a Johnny Appleseed -- traveling around the country like an adventurer. And we get to vicariously watch its progress. Today, we're throwing our where'sgeorge dollar into a lottery fund at work. Where will it go next? Toll booths, bars, and Florida amusement parks seem like popular destinations, but at least one bill's been passed via a stripper! Have you seen a where'sgeorge bill yet?
posted by debrahyde
on Aug 1, 2001 -
11 comments
Another blog-tracking tool... Although I am braced for mefi attack for posting this one ("non-story - there are other web log trackers" etc, etc), I'm interested to hear what me-fier's think about the ultimate viability of such a product. Is a comprehensive weblog crawler a viable product? Would google-like algorithms work? What would this mean for said "memes" and their proliferation on the net? Further, is there a potential for a "commodification of the meme?" Would the corporates, in the style of
viral marketing gimmicks
("I Kiss you!"), use such a "meme tracker" to identify and exploit net culture
"hot spots?"
posted by preguicoso
on Jul 30, 2001 -
23 comments
The Day My Car Ratted Me Out. Dear Winston Smith,
Your 1984 Corvette has informed us that over the past month, you have failed to obey the speed limit 36 times, at times reaching speeds exceeding 130 MPH. As A result, we feel that we can no longer provide you with coverage. We have also supplied this information to the proper authorities, their jackbooted thugs should be in your driveway momentarily. Thank you.
INGSOC Insurance
First it was the rental car companies, now it is GM and the Insurance companies. This is the top of a very slippery slope of privacy issues and technology, specifically GPS.
WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
posted by hotdoughnutsnow
on Jul 27, 2001 -
45 comments
Google Zeitgeist charts the popularity of certain search queries on Google
(via Slashdot). Of course, it'd be more interesting to track your own keywords, and
you can. I stumbled across this partially hidden Google feature last night.
(More inside...)
posted by waxpancake
on Jul 6, 2001 -
23 comments
