When it comes to privacy in the digital age, the individual's right to privacy is constantly a matter of remaining proverbially silent in a shouting world. Our technology shouts out to the world as our watches auto-synch to the world standard beacons, our phones and pagers track our location like OJ in a bronco, car dealers listen in on our radios as we approach their lots, our home IP address allows websites to log our location and time of each visit, text and email are tracable through the net, our credit/debit place us at the scene of each transaction, and even our paper money is tracked on private websites.

As anyone can see, short of becoming Amish, silence is not an option in modern society. Silence just became harder with the annoucnement of new technology by Google which holds the potential for locating wwireless users geographically.

The tradeoff for privacy, for some, has been the “negotiated anonimity” that can be acquired through some mechanisms. This includes the use of anonymizer programs, wireless network cards and wifi systems.

Many of these mechanisms require some sort of identifiers, like paying Starbucks for wireless access to their coffeehouse networks. Yet, many free wi-fi systems abound, making it less easy to find their users. Some websites implant cookies, others require log-ins to accounts to track users. The latter websites might be connected to bigger firms like Google or Yahoo which use the same user log-in data, making it easier to track individual users.

None-the-less, those users who surf the cybercafes anonymously using wifi, and avoiding log-in websites, may be losing some anonymity with the new Google technolgy.

Google has applied for a patent that uses deductive logic algorithms assign probably locations “based on packet headers and estimated transmission rates.” Combined with the easily found IP address, time of use, public wifi listings, demographics, and carrier coverage maps, while cross-referencing use patterns for time and area, Google has an increasingly hgher potential of locating individual users. While less dire in America, the use of such technology in against people in places like China is greatly disturbing.