Do You See What I See? Big Brother Does!
Your YouTube and Vimeo video clips often provide more information than you may have intended. You may see a guy walking past in the background of your video shot, but others see that as documenting where that person was. The neilsen produced a paper in 2011 documenting the buying power of African Americans . According to the paper, 23.9 million African Americans were online in the month of July 2011 alone; and most were on social networking/blog sites. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect that a fair amount of video uploads took place during those several millions of site visits.
Agencies such as Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) agency are working hard to piece together your uploaded videos to create a panorama that can be used to observe and identify individuals. An article I read in the print version of July 2012 edition of Popular Science called Over Seen provides details regarding the work of these groups to use data from civilian video uploads and surveillance video from domestic drones. Combining this data with off the shelf biometric technology, they can identify an individual and track their movements. They are currently seeking ways to identify the location of the camera (i.e., where YOU are) based on images in the video that you record. So Big Brother can not only follow someone in your video, they can know when and where you are when you shoot the video.
Uploading videos is certainly a fun way to share your experiences. However, every shred of information you provide must be scrutinized and reviewed to insure that you share only what you want to share.