There are more sneaky ways than ETags to track you without cookies. Some of the more diabolic schemes involve sending you a specially crafted PNG file, then reading is pixel values using HTML5 canvas, or inserting invisible links into pages and then checking if they have the ":visited" pseudo-class. For more information, see the Wikipedia entry for Evercookie.
Anyway, most of these techniques can be mitigated by clearing your cache. I clear mine after each browsing session, so while I might get tracked for a few hours, I should appear as a different person the next time I come online.
While there may not be ways to track people in tons of CCTV footage at the present time, there is certainly work underway.
Facebook already has a decent method to identify people by their faces on photographs, and although the feature is currently "turned off" for certain countries, it certainly exists and can be used by law enforcement. Several thesis projects at my school are aimed at recognizing people in video, and then there is the European Union project called INDECT that aims to aggregate information from available CCTV streams and "detect criminal threats".
It may be out of the question to put large numbers of spies out in the streets because ultimately, they will start being noticed by the citizens and creep them out. But if you put these spies behind CCTVs, the citizens will grow used to the presence of cameras and won't mind intelligence agents taking notes and profiling people from a closed office far away.
P.S. Thanks for the image of a ninja video camera, I chuckled as well.:)
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There are more sneaky ways than ETags to track you without cookies. Some of the more diabolic schemes involve sending you a specially crafted PNG file, then reading is pixel values using HTML5 canvas, or inserting invisible links into pages and then checking if they have the ":visited" pseudo-class. For more information, see the Wikipedia entry for Evercookie.
Anyway, most of these techniques can be mitigated by clearing your cache. I clear mine after each browsing session, so while I might get tracked for a few hours, I should appear as a different person the next time I come online.
While there may not be ways to track people in tons of CCTV footage at the present time, there is certainly work underway.
Facebook already has a decent method to identify people by their faces on photographs, and although the feature is currently "turned off" for certain countries, it certainly exists and can be used by law enforcement. Several thesis projects at my school are aimed at recognizing people in video, and then there is the European Union project called INDECT that aims to aggregate information from available CCTV streams and "detect criminal threats".
It may be out of the question to put large numbers of spies out in the streets because ultimately, they will start being noticed by the citizens and creep them out. But if you put these spies behind CCTVs, the citizens will grow used to the presence of cameras and won't mind intelligence agents taking notes and profiling people from a closed office far away.
P.S. Thanks for the image of a ninja video camera, I chuckled as well. :)