Hypothetical question: If you could avoid all the government paperwork involved in paying taxes, registering for services, and getting licenses by pushing a button that said SHARE ALL INFO, would you do it? Or would you have concerns about privacy and manipulation? If you had a SHARE SOME INFO or a SHARE NO INFO would one of those be more appealing, even if it meant more work from you? How much do you want to share with family? friends? vendors? your employer? the world?
The Internet of Things will take privacy and security concerns — already problematic — and bring them to a new level. It will enable tracking, manipulation, surveillance, and control in helpful, unexpected, and disturbing ways.
Helpful – One of the most entertaining future visions I’ve seen in awhile is Corning’s A Day Made of Glass (in a few versions). Your information, projects, and preferences follow you along allowing continuous action and interesting forms of collaboration. These capabilities imply detailed profiling, identity management, algorithms that pull together diverse streams of real-time information, build associations, prioritize based on history, and deliver in a timely, context-aware forms. The bits and bytes coming from a car door handle, a window, weather reports, closed-circuit cameras, and face recognition combine with masses of stored data and process projections to inform, entertain and serve us. I like a world where I get a perfect cup of coffee, am reminded to send a birthday card to my mom, sample the latest Elvis Costello tune, and always have fresh nonfat milk in the refrigerator.
Unexpected – Less charming was a New York Times article that explained how businesses now connect the dots to profile us and those around us. The kicker in this article was that a retailer knew a man’s teenage daughter was pregnant before he did. The breadcrumbs we leave as we surf the Web, buy our groceries, and carry around GPS enabled phones tell a lot of people we don’t know a lot about us already. Amazon knows exactly how far I get in each book or article I put onto my Kindle. Are we ready for a world of smart mailboxes that read our letters, smart roadsigns that note when we pass, and smart underwear that broadcasts health information — into the cloud where it is tracked, collated, analyzed, charted, processed, and distributed? The algorithms keep getting better. And, even if privacy laws or intense encryption hide content, the relationships are likely to be visible and revealing. Just the pattern of communication can reveal a coming merger, the roles of members of a terrorist cell, and potential fraud.
Disturbing – Facebook tells me whom I should «friend.» Ads pop up on Google based on the Gmail I send or my Wikipedia searches. A video porn site is the source of several hits to my blog. Hmm. I already mark much of my social network private, enter misleading information in various profiles, and and avoid search terms that might be interesting to government agencies. I fret about errors finding their way into files and documents that rule my life. (I know someone who has a name similar to that of a «do not fly» person. He always shows up early to the airport and expects extra attention.)
Most of the examples I have in mind are real in today’s relatively siloed and data-poor world. The Internet of things will multiply available data 10-fold, 100-fold, 1000-fold. Cross-checking will be easier. Algorithms will become more available (for some) and more powerful. They will do things in combination that will seem like magic. And everything will happen much more quickly. Add one more notion — artificial intelligence that will take on personalities. Siri is just the start. The Internet of Things will seem more and more to be another person, perhaps a friend. (We ourselves may have different avatars for different identities, or there may be online friends that are hybrids human-AI, multiple human, and odd stews of brains and silicon.)
The Internet of Things is not just about logistics, convenience, and personalized services. Much more is going on here. I am both delighted by and leery of what is coming.