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Original question on worldbuilding.stackexchange by Matt Benjamin
In a dystopian world where all citizens are tracked through a small device under their skin, how might one go about âoutsmartingâ the technology to move about unimpeded? My only thought is that some might physically cut it out and carry it around, leaving it behind when desiring to move about.
How possible would it be to create a âpocketâ of healed flesh to store the tracker when itâs supposed to be on his/her person?
I think for a good answer you need to more narrowly define the device. Does it get GPS and send that out? Is it encrypted? Does the hero know that encryption? Or does it just send âa signalâ (such as an ID number) and the location is derived by the receivers (kinda like a cellphone â towers donât know your GPS location, they just know youâre in the area of the tower). I have some ideas but it gets wordy if I have to also guess about the capabilities of the device itself. You could possibly ask another question if you need ideas about how the device should function. âJamieB
@JamieB I havenât given it much thought. As far as the story goes, it functions to indicate when the individual is in their residence and when they are at workâ so it could be rather crude. âMatt Benjamin
You mentioned (in a comment) that the device itself âmay be rather crudeâ, so Iâm going to suggest the device is a fairly straightforward transmitter that simply says something like âID 2568729â and local receivers detect this and know roughly where you are (likely within a relatively narrow area, say, 50 meters â weak transmitter but a pretty fine net of receivers).
Given that constraint, it should be fairly simple: when the protagonist needs a night out on the town, he covers his transmitter. Search for âfaraday fabricâ. I have actually tried one of these and it does work, at least for common frequencies that a transmitter like this would likely use. The transmitter is in his arm, he wears a faraday fabric wrap there and the signal canât be detected. As he does this, he activates his device, which is simply a recording of his own transmitter, set on a loop. Possibly he makes this switch while in the shower. Water tends to interfere with signals (also how your microwave oven works â the interference manifests as heat within water) and I think itâs at least plausible that a weak transmitter would be even weaker in a shower (or bath), so any âblipâ of his making the switch should be easy to write off, given a primitive system to begin with.
The important thing is that he appears to be at home while any nefarious deeds go down, and his wrap-and-repeater plan should be good enough.
As for the flesh pocket, âgo for itâ. I have no idea how realistic it is but it seems plausible and itâs not uncommon in sleuth stories. GURPS even has a rule for it. I imagine a real one would be like any piercing: use it or lose it, because the body keeps trying to close it up, but it is otherwise a healed up pocket. But the faraday fabric makes it fairly unnecessary. Getting caught with the fabric is probably a lot like being caught with your transmitter in a flesh pocket, so the solution is probably a personal preference for you.
I donât want to dig out the miniature device embedded in my arm â that sounds painful, risky and may leave a scar.
Instead, I am going to forge 200 more of them â all transmitting my id, and hide them in the belongings of other people.
The authorities wonât know which one is me.
Wait, but they will know I am up to no good, even if they donât know where I was.
So, I am going to make 40,000 more, sharing the ids of 200 random people. I may need a bit of a conspiracy to spread these around, but with a few volunteers to help (perhaps in return for having their id used in the mix), the authorities wonât know which of us were up to what shenanigans, and which were innocent bystanders.
Technology, as everyone knows, is *awful*.
The range of a tracking *implant* is limited. It doesnât have any space for a decent power supply or antenna, and given its size and location it canât be expected to transmit far and so will be challenging to read from a distance. They wonât be speaking to distant infrastructure like mobile phone masts or satellites, and they wonât be doing complex things like recording your movements for later upload. You need something mobile-phone sized to do that kind of tracking, and whilst you can put mobile-phone-sized objects in various parts of people it gets a bit uncomfortable a bit fast, and there are issues of charging and signal attenuation and so on. Very short range implantable RFID microchips are probably the things youâll be working with... not really *tracking implants* but merely ID chips that computer networks will use to do tracking... an important distinction.
This means in order to track people effectively, you need a huge number of scanning devices. In practise you might only fit them at âchoke pointsâ... entrances to shops or places of work or vehicles and public transport and so on. In a busy city, those scanners require an even shorter range, because deciphering multiple overlapping return pings becomes increasing impractical. In less urban terrain sensors might be quite widely separated, so going âoff gridâ is one option, though it comes at the expense of being limited in your ability to do stuff
You can therefore avoid being tracked in public if you a) avoid places with scanners, so your implant doesnât get triggered, or b) you remove or shield the tracking implant and make sure to only visit crowded places which donât have turnstiles (big shops, fine, public transport, probably not fine) giving you plausible deniability that your implant didnât ping.
Thereâs simply too much data out there to be able to audit every person and every ID ping, and the collection processes will be unreliable. All you have to do, then, is avoid your trail of ID pings looking âsuspiciousâ. Your friend (or an unsuspecting plant) can carry around a pocketful of ID tags, and so long as the tags are never associated with any crimes the chances of anyone auditing security camera footage and discovering that the clump of really intimate people who hang around together all the time is slim. Audits are expensive and time consuming, and there are literally billions of boring people out there doing boring things boringly. No-one can check up on all of them.
Just make sure that your ID is associated with regular comings and goings at your house and at the shops and you should be beneath suspicion. You donât have to be at home or shopping, but instead doing whatever nefarious thing you donât want the authorities to know about. Work is trickier, as people might notice if youâre not doing your job, so you probably need to be there in person, but maybe you should get a better job?
would it be to create a "pocket" of healed flesh to store the tracker when itâs supposed to be on his/her person?
If I were an evil dystopian enforcer, looking for unusual scars or healing marks around the site of the implant would be high up on my list of of things to do with dissidents.
Tampering with implants is likely to be a serious crime. If Iâm suspicious of you (and of course I would be), and Iâm suitably immoral (probably a requirement of my job), I can take a pocket knife to your implant location. Not to dig it all the way out, but just to make a bit of a mess. Boom, next time you get stopped and checked the next enforcer will see the scars and you can be arrested and jailed. Not a very clever means of framing people, but quite expedient.
If you want to counter a device, get into the mind of the device builder...
Suppose you want to track where people are. You could have each device respond to a central service. This might mean we have dead areas. Or the devices might report which other devices they are close to, like Bluetooth devices. This may mean you can cross-check the location from other devices. This might be helpful if you want to track a lot of people crowded on a train going through a tunnel, where reception is poor. If no-one gets off the train, the devices have little to report, and the bandwidth can be used effectively.
The devices might also detect what you are doing, from your heartbeat, from your acceleration, from any geolocation signals, and by communicating with nearby devices, and from the occasional direct checks from authority. The sudden disappearance of a device should trigger alarms from neighbours.
So, how would you counter this? You might somehow screen your device from any incoming signals, and use some broadband 2-way transmission, so you relay all the signals from your device at point A to point B, and return all the signals from point B to point A. This way your device and all the devices at point B would be convinced you had actually been there. You would have to be fairly close to pull this off but it might work.
A more risky approach might be to use AI to simulate signals from point B to your device at point A, and a second device to simulate signals at point B as though they were from your device. You would be found out if anyone checked your device history against the people you were supposed to have passed. But, if you are one ordinary person in a crowd, why would they?
Tracker will be in service animal.
It could have been a service dog but I actually have a service wombat. I put my tracker in the wombat. It was ok with that. The tracker usually corresponds with my general location because Woms goes almost everywhere with me, providing service as it does.
There is a bar (âThe Less Dystopianâ) I sometimes go to by myself because Woms harbors a grudge against one of the waitresses there. When I am at the bar it looks to those tracking me like I am still home, and actually home in bed because if I am not there to shake the can full of pebbles the bed is where Woms goes.