You have a Tracking Device that will Tell the World Everything About You - Your Cell Phone

Bruce Sterling's "Dispatches From the Hyperlocal Future" is a great read. It prompted my thinking below about my cell phone and our likely future:

In the not-so-distant-future truly everyone will carry their cellphones everywhere. More people will use them to take and to send pictures and movies directly to the internet along with global positioning system ("GPS") information, showing their loved ones exactly where on the Google Map they are. May be our phones can be switched on for automatically taking and uploading pictures to a Twitter-like service every 15 minutes. Near field communications will be built in (see Suica), hence you can make most of your daily payments by waving your phones over sensors. Not only is there a running database of where you are, there's another with what you purchased and at what time of the day (see Octopus). Then again, it's not like they don't already know where you live and where you work, waving your phone over sensors allow you access to your apartment complex and to your office.

Governments and companies will use your cellphone number as a universal unique identifier of you. It is unique to you and since so many daily conveniences are built in, it's not like you will won't try to have it with you all the time anyway. Hey presto, an instant national identification card system, mostly likely with GPS built-in as well!

With or without GPS, phone companies can already track you down with cell tower information, but soon may be they can be more specific by building near field communications sensors on billboards and posters that you walk past everyday, looking to hookup temporarily with your cellphone. They can beam very specific marketing messages to your ears based on what they know about you via your cellphone. Also posters and city landmarks will have little square barcodes called "semapedia tags/ semacodes". You can read the tag using your cellphone camera and it go online and give you more information about the location and the product. It will also bind your cellphone (hence, you) to that product at that location and at that time. Who will have the most immediate database of who you are and where you have been, when and what strikes your fancy - how about your phone company? Phone companies will no longer be in a telecommunications business. They will be in a media / marketing business and unlike the Internet advertising business, phone companies know exactly who you are, how much you spend and much much more.

In the future people will want to pay not just to get away, but to get offline. They will rent time in quiet rooms with no connections, wired or wireless. They will buy Faraday cages, big and small to prevent general access to their cellphones and other tale-telling devices (what about the RFID tags on your clothes?). The extent of this line of thinking goes long and far. The gist of it is, we have already surrendered ourselves to a Universal Identification Card system that will tell the world everything about us, they sell it to you and they call it a cell phone. It won't work, you say, because anyone can take and use your cellphone? Well, have you seen those with biometric security built in? They will make it so convenient that you won't want to leave the house without it, more over, it doesn't look like you will be able to.

May be a company will come along and give us free cell phone services in exchange for all our information (Google Cell Phone?)?