Privacy

Abstract: Though it brings us many benefits, the march of technology makes an encompassing surveillance network seem almost inevitable, and radically changes our expectations of privacy. We owe many of the expectations of privacy we used to enjoy to a combination of immature technology and insufficient manpower to monitor us. But these protective inefficiencies are giving way to technologies of data processing and digital surveillance that will change our beliefs about privacy. We are widely tracked by public surveillance cameras, our credit-card transactions, our passes through the fast-lanes at toll booths, and our cell phone calls to name only a few of the data points that could be assembled about our lives. Each year brings more sensitive and widespread sensing devices, including cameras, microphones, and, potentially, biological sensors, all increasingly connected through efficient networks to ever more powerful data processing and storage technologies. Cameras are spreading like kudzu -- in toll plazas, on public streets, and in public parks. We welcome them as crime-fighters, even as they eliminate our ability to move through the world untracked. Face and voice recognition software may soon permit image data from surveillance cameras to be cross-referenced to profiles of each person observed. To get a hint of the future, enter your street address at globexplorer.com. You will see a satellite picture nearly good enough to show a car parked in your driveway, or in mine. Better resolution is coming soon. We are moving toward a transparent society in which our actions and transactions are followed, our lives tracked and documented, by folks we neither know nor trust; each of us a star in our own Truman Show. Ad RFIDs and see that our children will live in a surveillance network.

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