Today io9.com posted an article about a canadian University professor by the name of Steve Mann who was assaulted in a McDonalds in France for wearing a computer device similar to the upcoming google glass. http://io9.com/5926587/what-may-be-the-worlds-first-cybernetic-hate-crime-unfolds-in-french-mcdonalds
I thought about this and wondered, why was he assaulted in the first place and concluded that the french McDonalds employees were probably uncomfortable with being recorded. They were either upholding what they thought to be their duty to prevent competitive research as far as photographing their restaurant and menu (some businesses do not allow inside photography), or they were personally concerned about having their photographs taken. Steve Mann was able to take photographs of the assailants in the encounter despite them breaking his device because that is what it does. Yet doesn't that in some way prove the point of their concerns?
A technologically augmented person is capable of recording everything around them. The lack of precedence has left the future of such possibilities in their litigious infancy and is currently a matter for the internet voices of discourse and descent. Steve Mann carry's a note from his doctor and wears the device as part of his research as a University professor. Are these justifications any different than a person simply wearing google glass? Do private citizens in public have the right not to be recorded? Is every place of business then a sanctuary of privacy where recording devices should not be allowed? What is the point then of using devices like this in public? Will it be like smoking cigarettes and electronic devices will only be allowed in designated areas? These questions are only the beginning. They are the proverbial tip of the iceberg in a titanic set of issues to come.
The post-information revolution is marked by countless threats to our privacy from social networking, to data farming, TSA airport scanners, GPS cellular geotagging, online web traffic cookies and whatever else can be surmised from the digital crumbs we leave laying around. I'm going to briefly discuss a few things that are less common knowledge as a means to broaden the debate because like the music industry's fight against digitized music, the battle for our privacy is practically already over. We are on a path of evolution towards existing as a collective consciousness where social transparency has replaced privacy.
We voluntarily forfeit most of our privacy through our social networking. We do so because the benefits outweigh the cost and only broadcasting to our friends and followers seems to be an acceptable amount of privacy. As long as my boss can't see it, who cares? Well, in actuality all of our traffic exists on servers in the cloud of information and we are establishing a permanent record of everything we ever do? If you thought figuring out the history of Julius Cesar from pottery artwork and the forensic science of CSI was impressive, just wait until your grand children's grand children go through your instagram photos. Not only that but every time you're logged into your gmail, words that you type and even searches and sites you visit are all logged. If you don't believe me, try typing boobs twice in a row in your search bar. Every time you tweet whether it originated from your foursquare app or not, you have just geotagged your account with your location data. Even if you don't tweet it, the cellular network server logs will still have location information from every time your phone triangulated its position and selected which towers to connect to. We forfeit this information because its collection is not meant to be personal. The data is collected for the optimization of the service that is provided. Whether its for your own good or whether the data that is farmed is sold by spotify, facebook or google to advertisers, it will soon cease to be unpersonal.
As our ability to process prediction information evolves into more quantum based visualization of potential realities, we will start tracking personal data. We won't only care if you typed canon into your search bar so that Amazon can recommend which camera deal you should look at. We're going to start caring who you are and how you behave. We're going to start caring about who you interact with and what kind of influence you have on other people. The data farming itself is far more valuable then the camera you were going to purchase. People just don't see it yet because they can't even imagine what these kind of tools will look like. Let me be the first to explain that we will eventually model your mind from the data traffic. Every tweet you ever post, will provide a collective context by which to profile and model everything from your social values, psychological states, and statistical information about your reactions. Basically what I imagine is a way of modeling a person as a quantum super position in psychological space. We would visualize each person as a quantum graph of possible behaviors. There's no point in privacy because we would know what you're going to do before you would even do it.
Not only that, but what happens when every car, every person, and every public space is packed with devices that record information about what's going on in the world. When cars start driving themselves they will be mounted with recording technology. Every person with a pair of google glasses will be recording information. And in the name of national security, all of the devices will be accessible to the necessary agencies. Not only that, but I read an article the other day about a device for airport security that sounded like a laser spectrometer that was capable of measuring whether or not you had even a few molecules of cocaine stuck to a dollar bill in your wallet or your adrenalin was rising. A spectrometer determines the molecules and elements in a substance through calculation like figuring out atomic weight. Only a laser spectrometer would gather this information from measuring the change in the speeds of light as they are absorbed and reflected by your body and clothing. Despite how it works, what it means is you could mount them all over the city. You could even attach them to your google glasses and look at a person and it could tell you whether their oxytocin levels were rising so that you knew if they were attracted to you.
Imagine a world where a person is sitting in a coffee shop. A guy looks over at a girl and instantly messages her a greeting instead of walking up and physically talking to her. The girl receives the message and she looks over at the man and starts going through all his information. Certain types of things require granting access. The guy can see that she is looking and starts granting her access requests to things like his instagram and facebook accounts. She starts going through his tweets and starts building personality models based on the words he uses. The guy can see that her oxytocin levels are rising, her adrenalin levels are minimal, and knows that she has not found anything surprising. The girl is currently dating a different guy, and he decides to check in on her. He messages her and starts viewing her activity. Some of it is currently cloaked or hidden, so he starts running simulations that factor in the time intervals of her invisible traffic and the possibilities based on her geo-location and time of day. He can tell that she is meeting someone because the amount of process power that she is using, so he asks her who she is talking to. She could try to lie to him, but there isn't really a point because he would eventually be able to tell, so instead she starts sharing her vision. She shows him the guy she met and all his collected data. She asks if this upsets him. He replies you tell me if I should be concerned. He starts running simulations to see if he should be concerned and starts tweeting it and asks for an opinion poll on whether he should be concerned. friends of his and random followers start chiming in their votes and comments based on the information at hand.
This is a world without privacy and a world where we live in a collective conciousness. Currently it is science fiction, but the technology exists to make it become science fact. It's not too far away, it's right around the corner and barely different from the way things exist right now. The question that I'm asking is, if you think about it. Really think about it. Are you gonna throw that world out of your McDonalds? Or are you mad that the people who don't yet have the technology are discriminating against your right to be public?
Beep boop beep beep, robots n stuff,
-MM
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