New Tracking Tech
Companies and governments have always been trying to track you. From surveillance cameras, to tracking what you do online, it seems that no matter what we do, we have lost our sense of privacy.
Now DARPA, along with the U.S government, are tracking surveillance even further with the ability to track anyone, anywhere. DARPA has just created a drone called ARGUS-IS that can track anything within 25 square kilometers. It uses 1.8-gigapixel video surveillance to accomplish this tracking. The 1.8-gigapixel video surveillance is made by combining the images from 368 smaller cameras. This means that you can zoom in anywhere you want and zoom in so much that you can actually see people’s figures and what they look like. The drone is takes the video from an altitude of 20,000 and is probably has the highest resolution in the world. The ARGUS-IS also tracks everything that moves and tracks it and then stores the data. This means that the drone 600 gigabits per second. This is about 6 petabytes — or 6,000 terabytes — of video data per day. Luckily, the drone is not in use yet, but the government plans to keep this data and use it as a database for later use, or refer to it if there is a terrorist attack or a robbery.
Here is the ARGUS-IS in use:
1.8 gigapixel ARGUS-IS. World's highest resolution video surveillance.
This drone can track essentially everything. If these were mass produced, they can watch over the whole country and track what we do. The drone was originally going to be deployed in Afghanistan but was never used. It is unknown what the drone will be used for in the future. It could be used for spying during wars, but could also easily be used to track people in the U.S as well.