Surveillance of your activities – and those of

Surveillance of your activities – and those of most Americans – is now just a fact of everyday life. People are monitored when they browse the Web, when they use their cellphones, when they drive and when they use their credit cards, among other things.

The Wall Street Journal analyzed a variety of everyday situations and found more than 20 different ways that people’s information is regularly recorded. That number does not include special situations such as border crossings or surveillance that occurs only when someone is suspected of a crime.

A story in today’s Journal also looks at the spread of digital tracking through the lens of one technology – automatic license plate readers, which photograph license plates at blazing speed and record the number and location. These devices are just one example of how routine it has become for Americans’ normal behavior to be watched by both government and corporate entities.

This surveillance has crept into people’s lives gradually as computers have become more efficient and cheaper – and as data analysis has become more enticing. The price to store a gigabyte of information for a year dropped from $18.95 in 2005 to $1.68 in 2012, and it’s expected to drop to just 66 cents in 2015, says market research firm IDC.

Other devices the Journal surveyed also showed a drop in prices. When portable car navigation devices first came on the market in 2004, they cost about $800 on average; now they are usually priced below $200, according to technology market research firm Allied Business Intelligence Inc.

And a typical automated license plate reading system sold by manufacturer Elsag now costs $15,000, down from $25,000 in 2004.

Not only are computing costs decreasing, but technologies are becoming much more effective.

Consider facial recognition technology. Five years ago, it only worked in very controlled settings such as passport checkpoints, said Michael Thieme of consulting firm International Biometric Group. Within the past 18 months, the software has improved to allow faces to be matched even in regular snapshots and online images, he said. This is in part because as computers become faster, the complicated geometric analysis involved in analyzing faces can be done more quickly.

The average price of a cellphone has increased 17% over the past 10 years – but processing capability has increased by 13,000% in that same time, ABI says. This allows phones to do things such as shoot video, get email and locate the user on a map, but it also means the devices store a lot of information about people that can be collected and tracked.

“Nowadays cellphones are sensors,” said says Col. Lisa Shay, a professor of electrical engineering at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point who studies tracking technology. “You’re now carrying a personal sensor with you at all times.”

Much of the data being collected through tracking technology is used to make services more convenient or for other benign purposes. Companies that track Web browsing say that they only want to use the data to show better advertisements. “Online advertising subsidizes the free content and services that consumers value and enjoy today,” Interactive Advertising Bureau counsel Stu Ingis wrote in a recent op-ed lobbying against a Do-Not-Track feature that would let Internet users turn off tracking.

But there are few regulations preventing sharing and sale of data once it is collected. Often it can be combined with additional information and used for other purposes. Many companies that collect data don’t associate people’s names with it, but data that once seemed anonymous can actually identify people if it’s pooled with other data sets.

The hope among companies and governments alike is that more data will make their jobs easier and better. The more information they have, the more patterns they can see: Law enforcement could spot likely criminals, and advertisers could send the right message to the right person at exactly the right time.

It’s unclear whether those targets are in reach yet or whether more data is in many cases simply creating more noise. Law enforcement agents have said that the overwhelming amount of information doesn’t always make the job of catching bad guys easier.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Parrella, who heads the computer hacking unit for the Northern District of California, says that there are so many different ways for bad guys to communicate these days that investigators can have a difficult time tracking suspects.

“Thirty years ago, the ability for one bad guy in America to communicate with a bad guy across the world was limited – they had to send a letter or a courier or a telephone call,” he said. “So in some ways, you could say that was the golden age because there was one pipeline.”

Still, the holy grail of perfect data has driven spending on technologies that gather and store information.

A nearly $30 billion industry has been created in Silicon Valley around companies with business models based on collecting personal data and using that data to attract advertisers. And the Journal’s reporting on license plate readers found that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has given more than $50 million in federal grants to local law-enforcement agencies for that technology in the past five years.

Worldwide spending on storage hardware grew to $4.3 trillion last year, from $2.7 trillion in 2005, according to IDC.

Because storage costs are decreasing and willingness to spend is increasing, businesses and law enforcement are often able to store large amounts of data just in case it may be useful later.

“Information that was once transient now lasts a lot longer,” Col Shay said. “If I’m photographed, that data is available in some database potentially for years.”