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Tracing You (2015)

computational surveillance system

Tracing You presents a website's best attempt to see the world from its visitors' viewpoints. By cross referencing visitor IP addresses with available online data sources, the system traces each visitor back through the network to its possible origin. The end of that trace is the closest available image that potentially shows the visitor's physical environment. Sometimes what this image shows is eerily accurate; other times it is wildly dislocated. What can a computational system know of our environment based on the traces we leave behind? Why might it want to see where we are? How accurate are the system's data sources and when might they improve? Finally, what does this site's attempt to trace its visitors reveal about who (or what) is reading the web? By showing how it sees us in real-time, Tracing You provokes these questions and more. More...