Clive Thompson at Collision Detection notes that the new Nike shoes that can broadcast your footsteps to your iPod (making it into a pedometer) can also be used to stalk you:

A group of computer scientists at the University of Washington wondered if they could build a simple device to secretly track somebody by the signal emitted from their shoes. So they set up a laptop, and whaddya know: It turns out that each shoe broadcasts a unique identifier, and it took the scientists only a few hours to write computer code that would sniff it out and track it. They wrote a report summarizing the stalkertastic possibilities raised by the shoes, as their press release reports:

A jealous boyfriend could track a woman's movements, or compare them with the movements of a suspected rival. And although a receiver only picks up the signal when a person is within range, a stalker could hide receivers near a home, a gym and a restaurant, for example, to closely monitor his or her target's movements.

Nice! Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg. As more and more products are shipped with radio-frequency ID labels, it'll be increasingly easy for people to track where you're going based on the radio-ID being constantly squirted out by, oh, your cup of coffee.

Or, as Thompson goes on to note, your credit card.

Posted at 7:18 PM in Brand Cultures, Technology | View blog reactions