A pretty long read that I found interesting primarily for it's talk about our dependence on tech and our "hidden contract" with technology, not in the sense of quietly giving up information (to ads) but our assumption that we're not part of the problem.
Let me ask a yesterday question: How do you feel about traffic jam
detection based on the handoff rate between cell towers of those
cell phones in use in cars on the road? Let me ask a today question:
How do you feel about auto insurance that is priced from a daily
readout of your automobile's black box? Let me ask a tomorrow
question: In what calendar year will compulsory auto insurance be
more expensive for the driver who insists on driving their car
themselves rather than letting a robot do it? How do you feel about
public health surveillance done by requiring Google and Bing to
report on searches for cold remedies and the like? How do you feel
about a Smart Grid that reduces your power costs and greens the
atmosphere but reports minute-by-minute what is on and what is off
in your home? Have you or would you install that toilet that does
a urinalysis with every use, and forwards it to your clinician?
Thoughts?
Brotherhood of the Bear | HAB | Mess | SDnet archivist |
There's a line to be drawn between how invasive you let technology be and how involved you want to be with it. Some things have far too much potential to be abused. Take the urinalysis toilet. Suppose you move from a state where weed is legal to a state where it's not. You take a leak, you get arrested the next day. Or-- worse-- you have a friend over, they smoked some stupid yesterday, they use your bathroom and *you* get arrested.
Or to put the toilet in another example. Suppose you don't have one at home. What about your employer, though? One day they tell everybody you have to wear a new ID tag. You take a leak in the company toilet after doing some hard drinking the day before. Later, your boss calls you in for a Serious Talk about your drinking habits...
I'm not terribly comfortable with that. I can live with, say, Google tracking my search patterns and Firefox keeping a log of my passwords, but I have to draw a line somewhere.
Bear in mind that I'm the type of character who collects and uses swords (not on people, of course), prefers hand-powered woodworking tools to power tools, and uses a brick phone over smartphones. I've about reached my limit on new technology.
I have thought for some time now that the fight over what, if any, right to privacy we really have in the face of automated data-mining and data analysis would wind up defining a big part of social trends in the 21st century.
If present trends continue we're going to live in an automatically-surveilled fishbowl, and most of the information will be going to private companies- who in turn give it to whatever government wants to ask.
On the other hand, this may turn out to be self-limiting, or there may be a serious negative public reaction to the trend that creates a countermovement in the 2020s and 2030s- for a number of reasons.
Regrettably I'm starting to see things getting to the point where the ordinary person can buy a new computer-- brand new off the shelf, nothing on it except the OS and usual shovelware-- install it in his house, and within a week his Internet browser brings up his most common websites when he logs in. Without him asking it to do so. His computer prioritizes tasks to the most common programs he uses. He has done nothing to tell it to do so... but it does so anyway. The popups on his browser are tailored specifically to his interests-- if he's a car guy, every advertisement he sees is some kind of deal on engines, parts, whatever. Even if he goes to a porn site, it shows him links to porn involving cars first thing (maybe people having sex while street-racing or whatever).
And he won't have done one damn thing to cause this to happen. It's what the computer and various programs are being tuned to do.
I know you can already make something like this happen... but one day, you won't have to.
You think things are bad now? Wait until all the police agencies are officially given the right to do warrantless searches and monitor all your electronic activity (I'm sure they do it already, but it's generally not accepted in the courtroom... yet). Then the fun will really start. In the not too distant future average street cops will have the ability and authority to use facial recognition to ID you and immediately have access to pretty much all information about you that is stored electronically somewhere (including you own electronic devices if they are connected). Then they can use that as evidence to lay a charge. And you can bet the day will come when it will be mandatory to give the government all your biological information (fingerprints, DNA etc) if you want government issued ID.
The excuse the government will make for all this of course is that if you're not a criminal you have nothing to hide.
"I reject your reality and substitute my own!" - The official Troll motto, as stated by Adam Savage
the funny thing is , when I'm doing data analytics I don't care about you. You aren't important. You're just a wee gas particle when I'm trying to measure and optimise the pressure.
Sure, I might segregate the data population by age, sex, weight, surfing habits, presence on different social media and especially buying habits, much like I'd want to know the ratio of H2S to Co2 to CH4 in biogas, but you? phah. got bigger fish to fry
"Aid, trade, green technology and peace." - Hans Rosling.
"Welcome to SDN, where we can't see the forest because walking into trees repeatedly feels good, bro." - Mr Coffee
I actually think corporate surveillance is more likely to go completely nuts than state surveillance, at least in most of the developed world. So far we haven't seen a lot of people convicted of thoughtcrime for what they post on Facebook, and it is likely that this will remain true. While it's common for us here to say that various Western governments are trending toward police states, most of the people in those governments have a lingering fondness for basic civil liberties. And they are genuinely going to be concerned about public backlash if the average member of the public is actually inconvenienced or feels oppressed by state programs.
Corporations have much less fear of this- Google has basically been taught by its own huge userbase that nobody gives a damn how much information it collects on you, or how it uses that information as long as they don't actively collaborate with credit card fraudsters or something.
I'm not so sure about that. Collecting, processing and storing all that data will cost money. So corporations won't do it if the data isn't profitable to collect. For example, I can't see my religion being useful if they already have my purchasing history. So I can't see the corporations collecting it. Though if someone got hold of their data, they could probably figure out my religion.
At the same time the NSA's policy of collect everything and figure out how to use it later tells me that state surveillance has already gone nuts.
