With modern surveillance techniques and technologies, it is possible to physically go missing but impossible to disappear digitally

We are being digitally tracked and monitored today more than ever before.  Some argue that society is heading in a direction that would end in George Orwell's 1984 dystopia.  In a story coming out of Minneapolis, a father walked into Target and demanded to see the manager.  He had discovered that her daughter had been receiving coupons for baby clothes and cribs, and accused the manager at Target of encouraging his daughter to get pregnant.  A few days later the manager called to apologize, but it was the father who apologized, as he had found out that his daughter was actually pregnant.  Target, with the use of prediction models, formulas and collected data from the girl’s past purchases, knew that the girl was pregnant before her own father did.  Technology today is so advanced that everything we do is collected by computers and processed.

Today stores have infrared cameras to watch your eyes and what you look at in the store, machines pour coffee when they sense you yawning, and laser-based scanners that can tell what you ate for breakfast are being developed.  These sorts of technologies are developed by companies mostly to make better business decisions and by governments for surveillance, and are being implemented all everywhere, including the University of Maryland Campus.  The university police are using student’s phones as tools of surveillance for emergencies explained Captain Marc Limansky, former University Police spokesman.

The world today is under 24/7 CCTV surveillance, browser cookies, traceable debit cards and cell phones, fingerprinting and DNA analysis.  Despite all of these technologies, in the United States alone 327,000 go missing, more than 2000 of them never to be found again, dead or alive according to a report by BBC.  These people usually may have been victims of unsolved or unknown crimes, had an accident and possibly tried to start a new life elsewhere.

In spite of the surveillance technology today, people go missing every day.

It might appear to be impossible to disappear when a crime like kidnapping or murder is not involved since to disappear, even for a month, one would have to evade family and friends, work, and bills to name a few.  Earlier this year, Janet Veal passed away in her apartment in Ringwood, Hampshire, UK.  Her pet cats had eaten portions of her body while she was laid in her kitchen floor, undiscovered.  She went missing for a couple of weeks. In another case, 7 years ago, Joyce Carol Vincent was found dead on her sofa in London, or at least her skeleton was found, as she had been dead for at least 3 years.  Her TV was still on when she was found, meaning that she had managed to go 3 years without being checked on, by friends, family, or bill collectors for the electricity, rent or cable TV. 

In both the cases above, the people who were missing were eventually found, but in some cases, people are not.  4 days after Timothy McVeigh bombed a building in Oklahoma City killing 168, one left legwas found in the rubble. The legs of all the victims had already been counted for and nobody else had been reported missing.  DNA analysis leads to the body of someone who already was buried with both legs, and when they switched the legs they could not do a DNA analysis test on the other leg as it had been embalmed.  18 years later, no one knows who the leg belongs to, leaving the 169^th victim of the Oklahoma City bombings an unresolved mystery.

Disappearing physically is feasible, but to disappear digitally however, is impossible.  

A database with your digital fingerprint, as mentioned by Thomas Mauriello, a Laboratory Instructor for the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice for the past 35 years, is used when dealing with missing people.  The case of a young man who appearedto people in Berlin claiming he did not know who he was.  He lied about his name, age and past but was then identified as Robin van Helsum.  He had left his home in Hengelo and went to Berlin to try and start a new life by claiming he was someone else, living in the forest for a while and making up a story that would hopefully change his life.  It is because of the permanent database that Professor Mauriello talks about that this young man’s original identity was discovered.

This digital database is not always correct however.   In the Canary Islands in 2001, an employee at a store mistook a 35-year-old woman for her best friend because she looked exactly like her.  This similarity was due to the fact that her best friend and this look a like where actually identical twins, separated atbirth.  These two twins both had been misplaced at the hospital, meaning that the person they thought was their fraternal twin was actually a complete biological stranger.  Their whole lives they had been living as someone else, with the wrong names and identities, and they probably could have lived their entire lives that way too if it wasn’t for one persons observation.

The only way someone can disappear digitally is if they never existed digitally in the first place. 

People exist that do not have an official identity or that are a part of any mass database.  Outpostforhope.org mentions children thatare off the grid.  They approximate that an amount of nearly one million kids who are missing without anyone knowing.  This might be because they are not registered anywhere as they might have been born to homeless mothers.  These "invisible"children are also considered the easiest targets for trafficking.  While this is a very unfortunate reality, some wish they were invisible and untraceable like those kids.

It is not against the law to go missing under your own volition as long as your an adult.  People might have debts to pay or contracts to honor, but if that someone is an adult, the act of disappearing is not illegal in it of itself.  Some argue that all of this technology that is tracking their every move is a violation of their right to privacy.  These people might have to practice their right to disappear to protect their right to privacy, but as the cases mentioned in this post, it is proven that although physically disappearing is achievable, disappearing digitally is something that isn’t known to be possible. Theories like the ones presented in “How to Disappear: Erase YourDigital Footprint, Leave False Trails, and Vanish without a Trace,” by Frank Ahearn, only make it harder to track someone, but not impossible. No matter how long someone has been missing, they can always be found somewhere in a database.

listen to ‘Final ePorfolio Audio Summary on Surveillance and Disappearances’ on Audioboo