Total information about a person all the time requires knowing in real time where they are in time and space and what they are doing in terms of communication with the entities around them or in communication with them through any communication channel.
The real time time/space information is important. Either a person is in a static location of moving from one relatively static place to another relatively static position. Some move more than others. Brief static positions may or may not be as important a repetitive fixed positions in the same place for extended periods like where they sleep every night, or don't as the case may apply.
In our mobile world time in transit and mode are important pieces of information about a specific person. Flight on an airplane or other commercial carrier is well defined once a person is confirmed to be on board. Travel is a private vehicle is not monitored as exactly but is being monitored more by various methods like license plate readers and electronic devices that record and report location and vehicle operation information.
The answer to the subject line question is that we are either in one place geographically or moving from one place to another. Almost all the time? Well, I guess so. Even if we are in our own home we are either sitting in a fixed easy chair or moving within the house. There are ways and means to detect that if desired.
Most of our movements covering longer distances and time are in an automobile. The Great American Car. Once at a destination the proximity of the destination is a function of availability of parking and the average distance a person is willing to walk to a destination once parked is 1,000 feet. On the way to the destination there are many sensors, like cameras, our cell phone, a time clock at work or entry to a retail store that establish points of travel and duration spent at points as well as self evident purpose.
Time spent traveling in a car is one of the less documented time frames that is a significant amount of time that relates to a significant number of data points about us. It is comparable to "Vacuum Time" a time where space/time information is not generally known.
Here I will coin a phrase and then see by means of Google search if I win the prize of being the first to enter the phrase into the WWW in the context in which I use it.
Total Information All The Time Abhors "Vacuum Time". Total Information wants to fill that vacuum in accordance with its law of nature that dictates it must fill a vacuum.
It looks like I win the prize but there are too many coincidental search results that do not relate to the context in which I have used the term. Darn! I like to be a cut and dried "no result on search term" winner!
Surveillance must know where we are in space and time all the time. One of the places it does not conclusively cover is when we are traveling in a personal vehicle, or any vehicle for that matter. The latest technology in airborne tracking is an amazing spin off from battle field management but it is a mode of identifying the object first (target acquisition) as opposed to the target being self identifying all the time in real time. The later is the best way to acquire a target. Have it reveal its own time space status as well as all possible relationship information that may be associated with it. Speed, direction, number of occupants, time to next oil change, radio station tuned in, type of music playing, etc. hundreds of data elements since any one of them has the potential to be an important piece of any given puzzle.
Travel in a vehicle is becoming less of an information vacuum every day.
I intended to write about Jeff Jonas' brilliant puzzle analogy that he used to explain Entity Analysis. As you can see I side tracked that journey by the last couple blog entries. I am easily side tracked. The side track however is segue to time and spatial Entity Analysis.
More sidetrack here subsequent to the preceding paragraph:
This link: "Governments and corporations gather, store, and analyze the tremendous amount of data we chuff out as we move through our digitized lives."
Actually, in the digital domain world we are on the move all the time, even when in the real domain world we are sitting in a chair (at a computer) or washing our hands with the fact of running water somewhere in the house being recorded and reported in real time water usage monitoring. It is done in my town. Flush a toilet and the device using water is known by virtue of flush duration.
Meta data tells so much about us. Meta data is what is collected and transmitted when we drive a car. The more meta data the better the surveillance.
Australia has mandated two year retention of communication data. That is how long it must be retained. How long it may be retained for commercial data mining extraction might be much longer? Is there a law or does the law direct mandatory deletion at the two year mark? Probably not????
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