Off the grid: is it possible?

Off the grid: is it possible?

Until recently, evading some forms of digital surveillance was as easy as leaving your phone at home. That’s no longer the case.

By Brad Berens

Recently, I shared a microfiction (1,000 words or less), a short science fiction story called “The Ride” about a CEO who needed to get closer to one of her board members, and the elaborate lengths that a woman named Trix (who I’ve earlier written about here and here, but that doesn’t matter for this piece) went to make this happen.

This time, I’ll explore how realistic the story is or isn’t. You don’t have to read “The Ride” (although it ain’t bad) to understand this week’s piece, but fair warning: Thar Be Spoilers Ahead!

Let’s dig in.

In the microfiction, board member Jane Lackowski values her privacy so much that she rides a bike to and from her office with no technology onboard. Trix attaches a Bluetooth transmitter to Lackowski’s route using helicopter drones.

Although I told the story through Trix’s point of view, she is the villain of the piece.

Two recent articles inspired me to write “The Ride.”

The first, “Shoplifters could soon be chased down by drones” is from MIT Technology Review ($). Reporter James O’Donnell described how Flock Safety, a company started by helping police departments track suspects using helicopter drones, has now moved into making is possible for retailers to follow suspected shoplifters after they had left a store.

Former police chief and now Flock Safety drone program director Keith Kauffman described how it works:

If the security team at a store like Home Depot, for example, saw shoplifters leave the store, then the drone, equipped with cameras, could be activated from its docking station on the roof.

“The drone follows the people. The people get in a car. You click a button,” he says, “and you track the vehicle with the drone, and the drone just follows the car.”

The video feed of that drone might go to the company’s security team, but it could also be automatically transmitted directly to police departments.

This is a terrible idea: not because of the drones themselves, but because of the people using the drones and how they might misuse drone camera data. Will black people have drones following them out of stores more often than white people? Will police departments or the federal government subpoena camera data to trump up charges against people they don’t like? Will ICE use drone data to track and then arrest people who fit a racist profile of illegal aliens? Those are entities who might have some legal reason to get the data, but how safe is drone data from hackers?

Retailers have a right to protect their inventory from shoplifters, but the right to follow somebody shouldn’t extend past the parking lot.

The second article seems less sinister at first. In the Wall Street Journal ($), Aylin Woodward’s article, “The Evolution of the Running Shoe and What Comes Next,” describes recent innovations in sneaker technology. (I live in Portland, a.k.a. Sneakeropolis, so this sounds reasonable to me but might sound ludicrous to you.)

One tidbit about a newer sneaker company called Avelo caught my eye:

Sensors embedded in the insoles of the company’s high-performance shoes connect to a Bluetooth app to monitor information including pace, stride length, how much a runner’s foot rotates inward or outward and what part—the front, middle or rear—strikes the ground.

Insole sensors seem harmless—part of the “quantified self” movement that includes Fitbits, Oura rings, and other health-related wearables—but I tend to view the world through a dystopian lens. My first thought on reading this was, “what if somebody else uses the sensors?”

How hard, I thought, would it be for a stalker to use such sensors to track somebody?

(Although the WSJ sneaker story inspired “The Ride,” as I wrote it, I realized that I didn’t need Trix to bother with Lackowski’s sneakers because she could attach a transmitter to the bike, which was simpler for both the character and the author.)

Writing “The Ride” reminded me of something that happened to a friend a few years back. She had been dating a talented technician who, during their relationship, upgraded all her gear: new iPhone, new iPad, etc. After they broke up, he would pop up at odd and consternating places. I suggested a trip to the Genius Bar (remember that dystopian lens?). Sure enough, my friend learned that her ex had installed hard-to-find tracking software on her devices. Since her iPhone never left her hand, he always knew where she was.

This is what Simson Garfinkel, in Database Nation (2000), described as the “kid brother” problem: instead of Orwell’s Big Brother, we have an infinite supply of kid brothers spying on us through our devices.

Ah, those innocent days when all we had to do to avoid surveillance by governments, corporations, and individuals of questionable intent was leave our mobile phones at home.

Now technology can follow us anywhere.

Governments have long used Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) to monitor public spaces. There are 130,000 CCTV cameras in London, for example, or 13.4 cameras per 1,000 people. That’s nothing compared to cities in China where there are 700 million cameras or 494.25 cameras per 1,000 people, according to Comparitech.

Fixed CCTV cameras are disturbing, but (in London if not China) it’s reasonable to think that there are some spaces that can’t be surveilled. With the advent of camera-enabled helicopter drones, though, there’s no public place (and few private ones) where the expectation of privacy is reasonable.

Governments recording public spaces is creepy. Private companies and individuals doing it is terrifying.

How realistic is “The Ride”?

The technology is already here. What keeps this story in the near future rather than 2025 is the price tag. Trix has a large budget to buy cameras and drones and Bluetooth gadgets.

I’m not optimistic about government regulation constraining what drones are allowed to do. Another recent MIT Technology Review piece by James O’Donnell has the unsettling title: “The US may be heading toward a drone-filled future: The FAA is set to loosen rules to let people fly drones beyond their ‘line of sight.'”

Right now, powerful helicopter drones with lots of range are expensive and require technical expertise. Ukraine is using such drones to great effect fighting the war that Russia started.

However, over the last few decades of the digital revolution we have seen that yesterday’s expensive and hard-to-use technologies become easy features in tomorrow’s products. My first digital camera cost hundreds of dollars. Now it’s an app on my iPhone. AI used to be something that only corporations could use. Now we all have Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini, Pilot, and more—with free and fee versions.

William Gibson famously wrote, “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.”

Typically, we think of a more evenly distributed future as a good thing.

But that’s not always the case.
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Brad Berens is the Center’s strategic advisor and a senior research fellow. He is principal at Big Digital Idea Consulting. You can learn more about Brad at www.bradberens.com, follow him on Blue Sky and/or LinkedIn, and subscribe to his weekly newsletter (only some of his columns are syndicated here).

 

* Image Prompt: A photorealistic image of an athletic white woman in her 40s. She is sitting on the grass in a sunny meadow near to a bike path. It is after a long ride. She is drinking from a water bottle. She is not wearing a bike helmet. Her bike helmet sits on the grass next to her.

 

See all columns from the Center.

October 8, 2025