Every breath you take, every move you make...

I read an item on boingboing.net last night that threw me into a funk for the rest of the evening.

Using a set of video cameras and eye tracking software the system will be able to tell what someone looking at a window display has been staring at the longest, and will then provide more detailed information about the product via a passive or even interactive video display in hopes it will push them towards making a purchase decision.

In addition to being the most continuously-entertained culture in history, we are also the most heavily-monitored and surveilled. It's not enough for Big Brother to know what we buy by tracking our purchases with those retailer discount cards, to see what intersections we drive through with traffic signal cameras, measure our height against that ruler taped to the door sill when we walk into a convenience store and check what web sites we visit with proxy server software. He also wants to know what we're looking at while we walk down the street.

I become more and more persuaded that the only way to live relatively unwatched and unmonitored is to move so far out in the boonies that there's no economic incentive for anyone to spy on you at every turn.