Technology 100, Privacy 0

(Via IEEE Spectrum) If you have concerns about what technological surveillance and the Internet have already brought, get a load of the future.

[A] combination of political, cultural, and economic factors are transforming our world into a place where people, transactions, and things can be observed, monitored, and recorded almost everywhere, and almost all the time. Within the next several years, we'll be awash in powerful, cheap sensors: radio-frequency ID (RFID) tags that track objects (and the people who happen to be wearing, riding, or chatting into them); biometric sensors that will identify us by our unique irises, fingerprints, voices, walking patterns, or other physical quirks; Global Positioning System receivers, embedded into all manner of things, able to track us to within a meter; and tiny, high-resolution digital still and video cameras, also built into everything, from cellphones to wallpaper.

The resulting torrent of data will cascade into government and corporate data systems, as well as that system of systems, the Internet. Facts and information that are largely incoherent but overwhelming in volume and detail will accumulate in databases too scattered and numerous -- and valuable -- to be shut off completely from the rest of cyberspace.

Posted by Tom on July 08, 2004