Geo-Tracking tracks an object’s positions. That object might be you!
It might involve shipping goods to China: http://geotracking.org/
To learn about Geo-Tracking through Google Maps see this article:
http://www.listrak.com/Whitepaper/Email-Geo-Tracking/
This is on the day that Google hit the headlines yet again, and this time for accidentally harvesting user data as their cameras toured our streets!
As the BBC put it: “Britain’s privacy watchdog is to look again at what personal information internet giant Google gathered from private wi-fi networks.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11614970
I actually came across the word “Geo-Tracking” in a rather lovely EFL book called “Business Grammar Builder” by Paul Emmerson, published by MacMillan:
http://www.businessenglishonline.net/course/other-titles.htm
This book integrates Business English teaching with grammar reference material and exercises. It is full of up to date and interesting examples of texts relating to the current business world. The item “Geo-Tracking: We Know Where You Are” gives a good description of the various ways in which we are all tracked constantly and says “this might seem like science fiction, it isn’t. If you carry a mobile phone, there are now various ways to track your movements across the planet. You leave a digital trail via cell phone base stations and satellites …”
You may have guessed that one of my excuses for absence is that I’ve been doing a bit of English teaching recently, including Business English. That and a number of other things. I know my iPhone probably knows better than me what I have been up to as I find the more I do the less I remember. But then I am just a poor aging creature whose memory cells are no doubt dying at some horrendous rate (speeded up by every glass of beer I comfort myself with) and yet my digital trail will last for ever. Ah, to be immortal, as a series of binary digits! I may even challenge Zeno and the Tortoise one day:
http://www.mathacademy.com/pr/prime/articles/zeno_tort/index.asp
After all, infinity is open to all of us – at least in the imagination!
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
(William Blake)
Do not mock - soon the Imagination may be the only area of our lives that is free from surveillance.
I just noticed that Divergent Learner, a techno-constructivist blog, is featuring the IT IS ENGLISH blog, with a vote request, but it turns out the voting deadline has passed:
http://divergentlearner.com/blog/?page_id=489
Divergent Learner is another from Lexiophiles and looks interesting.
I’m not sure where they are physically based, though I have an idea. Just ask my computer if you want to know!
ETYM
Geo – Relating to the earth, and hence place.
To Track – to follow someone’s track or trail.
Track Changes – e.g. in Microsoft Word, this means to keep a record of all changes made to a document.
