The vast majority of us are being tracked with surveillance tech. These are the systems you need to know about (www.abc.net.au)

UPC’s and other product codes were ostensibly to track products, inventory, rotate stock, recall items, etc, and they do those things, but I believe they were also foundationally meant to track us. If you’ve ever worked certain aspects of retail, you may have stumbled across UPC reuse for unlike items – the former having been recalled, yet perhaps a small supply (or even a single item) was overlooked in the recall and remains inside the store. So, you might scan a can of corn and your system insists it is a tin of anchovies.

Even before debit cards, cheques were written for purchases and those cheques were either saved manually, or later, scanned and shredded, so the individual cheque with all your personal and banking info were still directly tied to that receipt for purchases. Obviously, this system missed a lot, as people continued to pay using cash, but the combined data collection was useful to begin to establish individual profiles, to include material means (which, alone, contains a wealth of information about a subject0.

We know that entertainment genres of all kinds are very personalized, clothing, colors, home decor, etc all build a picture of a personality. It also builds a picture of what you might be able to expect from a person. For instance, if someone’s library consists of mainly esoteric texts, you would be wise to expect different skills and abilities emerging from this person than one who only reads mainstream nonfiction, or romance or mystery or sci fi or horror. If you visit a library, there is a record of everything you have ever checked out for similar reasons – it serves the purposes for maintaining inventory but it also rounds out the picture of your interests and access to information.

I think they want to keep a close eye on people for far more reasons than marketing and general population control. I think some people get selected for more specialized attention if any signs show of potential based upon their consumption. I think, for anyone aware of the long history of military/government kidnapping of people showing certain potential(s) already knows this to some extent, but they didn’t always discover these latent abilities because a sweet blonde girl started a few huge fires. Much more often, the clues lie not in the spectacles, but in the quieter details.