George Orwell’s 1984 predicted a world of substantial surveillance. Spying on citizens is certainly growing, and if anything it is accelerating. One conclusion is that, with a touch of social massaging, we will end up completely surveilled.
Excerpts via an article reprinted at Mother Earth:
Estimates vary, but by 2020 there could be over 30 billion devices connected to the Internet. Once dumb, they will have smartened up thanks to sensors and other technologies embedded in them and, thanks to your machines, your life will quite literally have gone online.
It is easy to remove yourself from the web – just choose not to participate. The future, however, will include fixed, 24/7 monitoring that is much harder to switch off.
… The dangers aren’t theoretical. In November, the British tech blogger Doctorbeet discovered that his new LG Smart TV was snooping on him. Every time he changed the channel, his activity was logged and transmitted unencrypted to LG. Doctorbeet checked the TV’s option screen and found that the setting “collection of watching info” was turned on by default. Being a techie, he turned it off, but it didn’t matter. The information continued to flow to the company anyway. [Scary – link]
- Will eating habits collected by smart fridges be repackaged and sold to healthcare or insurance companies as predictors of obesity or other health problems—and so a reasonable basis for determining premiums?
- Will smart lights inform drug companies of insomniac owners?
Outside of your home, products like Apple’s iBeacon will offer improved shopping experiences, but the cost is your privacy – the more Apple knows, the better you are served!
Sooner or later, with smart devices seamlessly using sensors and Big Data provided by data aggregators, it will be possible to pick you out of a crowd and identify you in complex ways in real time. If intelligent surveillance cameras armed with facial recognition technology have access to social media profiles as well as the information stored by data aggregators, a digital dossier of your life could be called up on-demand whenever your face is recognized. Imagine the power retailers and companies will exert over your life if they not only know who you are and where you are, but what your weaknesses are—whether that’s booze, cigarettes, or the appealing mortgage rate with the sketchy small print. Are we looking at a future where the car salesman really does know what he has to do to put us in that car?
… “We see outdoor lighting as the perfect infrastructure to build a brand new network,” said Hugh Martin, CEO of Sensity Systems, a Sunnyvale, California-based company interested in making lighting smart. “We felt what you’d want to use this network for is to gather information about people and the planet.”
The answer, as always in CloakerLand, comes in two flavours:
1. Disconnect completely, and see your life become more and more difficult compared to regular folk, and appear on the radar of the powers that be – your absence makes you worthy of observance.
2. Maintain a natural Big Brother profile by generally participating. But cloak any activities that might be misconstrued by those who can lock you up. It’s the equivalent of being in the French Resistance of WW2 – regular citizen by day, dangerous rebel by night.
