Propelled by new technologies and the Internet’s steady incursion into every nook and cranny of life, the emerging fields of “collective intelligence” and “reality mining” offer powerful capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving community groups new ways to organize.

But now with the Internet, wireless sensors, GPS, Wi-Fi positioning, cell-tower triangulation, RFID chips and the capability to analyze an avalanche of data, a person’s profile can be drawn without monitoring him or her directly, which could create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of.