WiFi Tracking
“…a few hundred meters away….”
Forget RFID. Well, don’t, but National Scientific Corporation has a prototype of a WiFi tagging system that, like RFID, lets you track things in real-time and space. The advantage that the WiFi Tracker system has over passive RFID tracking is that you can keep tabs on objects with WiFi Tracker tags (which can hold up to 256K of data) from as far as a few hundred meters away (the range of passive RFID taggers is just a few meters). While you can do something similar with active RFID tags, with WiFi Tracker companies can use their pre-existing WiFi network to track things rather than having to build a whole new RFID system.
In other news, Apple is adding WiFi to the iPod.
And, of course, you can be tracked from your cellphone:
But the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice have seized on the ability to
locate a cellular customer and are using it to track Americans’ whereabouts
surreptitiously—even when there’s no evidence of wrongdoing.A pair of court decisions in the last few weeks shows that judges are split
on whether this is legal. One federal magistrate judge in Wisconsin on Jan.
17 ruled it was unlawful, but another nine days later in Louisiana decided
that it was perfectly OK.This is an unfortunate outcome, not least because it shows that some judges
are reluctant to hold federal agents and prosecutors to the letter of the
law.It’s also unfortunate because it demonstrates that the FBI swore never to
use a 1994 surveillance law to track cellular phones—but then, secretly,
went ahead and did it, anyway.