Clippings.reblog

The All Seeing Eye

From IEEE SPectrum Online

A portion of the above link..
In the opening article, "Sensors and Sensibility," Senior Associate Editors Jean Kumagai and Steven Cherry trace the assault to several connected technology developments. One is the percolation throughout our world of new or hugely improved sensors, such as radio-frequency ID tags, tiny digital cameras, cellphone-locator technologies, and minute Global Positioning System receivers. Another is the emergence of enormous databases of personal information, along with software that rapidly combs through those databases, finding connections and making inferences about people. The third is the availability of a cheap, easy way to instantly spread personal information and data gathered by sensors to every corner of the planet: it's called the Internet.

Combine some of thse elements and you get, for example, a means of tracking anybody carrying a cellphone. Mix and match them again and you get a U.S. Internet site that tells you how much your neighbors are donating to political organizations and which groups are getting their money. Another combination gives you the fragmented but globally available photo documentary of the abuses in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

There's much, much more to come. Starting this summer, making a simple airline reservation will automatically send queries ricocheting around huge private databases in the United States; in addition, increasingly powerful government computer systems will continue to monitor e-mail traffic flowing through Internet service providers in the United States. No wonder, then, that to some observers and activists, all this looks like an all-out attack on privacy, prompted by post-9/11 paranoia.

But to see it that way is to miss the larger and more interesting view of what's happening to us now, and where we're going in the future. In "We Like to Watch," Senior Associate Editor Harry Goldstein spends time with advocates of a transparent society. They insist that we have nothing to fear about revealing our quirks, pathologies, and personal data, so long as absolutely everybody is doing it—including our commercial and federal overseers. Our own loss of privacy will be a small price to pay for what we'll get in return, these advocates say.

source[Smart Mobs]

Posted by Gavin on July 08, 2004