Most people are now fully aware of how much tracking is going on when you go online, and how easy it is for companies and governments to know where you go, what you do there, and who you talk to. But meanwhile, another piece of technology has slowly started being adopted by organizations all over the world, and is still relatively unknown by most people, yet could be the key to bringing the type of surveillance state that we currently experience online, to the offline world.
Let me give you a little anecdote of something that happened to me last month. I walked into a local bank branch near where I live in Montreal, a bank where I don't have any account, and never interacted in any way, in order to ask about some investment products. I get directed to one of the staff members and I talked to her for about 10 minutes, never saying my name or giving her any way to identify me. I ended up not being interested in what she was offering and walked away. But as I did, the last thing she said was "Au revoir, Mr. Lambert." That's nice but how did she know who I was, despite the fact that I never gave any hint of my identity?
