http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/2014/04/19/how-urban-anonymity-disappears-when-all-data-si-tracked/?emc=edit20140420&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=58
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Big Brother is watching
popularresistance.org |
Hello Everyone:
Big Brother is watching you. Literally and metaphorically. We live in an age of constant surveillance. Our every movements, emails, posts, tweets, texts are monitored night and day. For the most part, nothing comes of it. I'm pretty sure the National Security Agency has a pretty good giggle with my information. However, how does all the data collection work at the urban level? What happens to our anonymity when Big Brother is tracking our every coffee and bagel run? In a blog post for the
New York Times titled "How Urban Anonymity Disappears When All Data Is Tracked," Quentin Hardy looks at our rapidly disappearing sense of anonymity in the urban context. Mr. Hardy writes, "Cities are our paradise of anonymity, a place for both self-erasure and self-reinvention. But soon cities may fall first in the disappearance, or at least a radical remaking of privacy."
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Urban surveillance infrastructure
ibm.org |
Information about our daily innocuous public comings and goings in urban cores can be cheaply aggregated. Everything we do is followed by cameras and sensors, which have become increasingly common in the urban landscape. Makes you feel self-conscious. The information gathered about your morning coffee run is stored and categorized thanks to cloud computing and bargain basement electronics. Deirdre Mulligan, a professor at the iSchool at the University of California, Berkeley says, "People in cities have anonymity from their neighbor, but not from an entity collecting data about them...These are far more prevalent in cities."
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Surveillance cameras
homelandsecuritynewswire.com |
Recently, a company called LocoMobi announced it had bought Nautical Technologies, the license plate recognition technology from the Canadian company Apps Network Appliances. The equipment sits at the entrance of parking lot, photographing the license plates of incoming cars. This data goes into the cloud computing infrastructure of Amazon Web Service. When the car exits the lot, another picture is taken and computers calculated how long the car was parked and applies the appropriate charge. The company's co-founder predicts connecting the system to a car's navigation mechanism, enabling drivers to find and reserve nearby parking lots without all that needless driving around. Your license plate is public information and an app for your car's navigation to help you secure a parking spaces sounds all well and find but can it help you find where parked your car when it's time for you to leave? Oh wait, there's an app for that.
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Police surveillance
in.reuters.com |
Oh yes, there's something else. Barney Pell, LocoMobi's co-founder and chairman says, "We can have so much fun with this...Imagine knowing that people who park here also park there-you've found the nearby stores, their affinities. You could advertise to them, offer personalized services, provide 'passive loyalty' points that welcome them back to the area." At this juncture, public data has become personal information. Quentin Hardy compares this to the company Euclid Analytics, which uses pings when a smartphone routinely looks for a Wi-Fi antenna and to track people moving through a crowded mall. On that last point, this could be useful for tracking shop lifters and other suspicious individuals.
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Google glass
en.wikipedia.org |
Quentin Hardy muses, "The more recording devices we put in the world, the more once-evanescent things take on lasting life." Every word we speak is increasing recorded and given new meaning and context when analyzed. In the past two weeks, it was reported that Google has filed for a patent to take its Google glass recording technology onto contact lenses. This all sounds a bit to James Bond for me. Many technologists involved with data aggregation see a benefit to a more civil society. Mr. Pell declares, "So many of out urban problems have to do with people breaking rules and cheating systems, then disappearing." This is true to a degree but some of the cause of urban problems has to do with more than breaking the rules and cheating the system. He cites behaviors such as able-bodied drivers parking in handicap parking spaces with illegitimate placards or running red lights. If this is his idea of urban ills, then we're all doing a lot better than we think.
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"You are under surveillance"
truth-out.org |
Here's a troubling statement, "What happens when every secret, from who really did the work in the office, to sex, to who said what, is that we get a more truthful society, " said David Friedberg, founder and chief executive of Climate Corporation. I say troubling because the truth is relative. People believe what they want to believe and the facts can be manipulated in such a way that it becomes the truth. Mr. Friedberg believes, "Technology is the empowerment of more truth, and fewer things taken on faith." Mr. Friedberg also believes that public awareness of hidden behaviors "is a conversation that will happen." By whose standard will we use in having this conversation about closeted behavior? This idea that technology will allows to take its own faith allows Ms. Mulligan to say "There is an idea here that data is truth and that's not always true...You may know who is running a red light, but you don't know if there is a sick kid in the back seat, and they are racing to the hospital." Well put.
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"Eyes on the street"
flickr.com |
More important, the deference paid to data comes at the expense of people making actual choices about their behavior. "If you want people to act morally, you don't tell them what they can and can't do." We all need to think about the effect on others, what should be done," adds Ms. Mulligan. Absolutely on point. How we behave publicly and privately has consequences. By relying on data to determine what is acceptable public behavior and what isn't, we are allowing someone else to impose their standard of morality on others. Let me qualify this by saying that if we are to be a civil society, we all have to abide by one universal standard of morality. We know it's wrong to steal and kill but where it starts to get murky is when we so narrow that scope of morality that it becomes a method of oppression.
Issues of traditional privacy will not just be urban issues. The nascent low-cost satellite systems will become a mirror of Earth, as close as possible to real time and at increasing granularity of a variety of data. While assorted companies collect our public information, the Federal Trade Commission in the United States and its regulators are rapidly becoming interested in how this information is used. On the flip side, it isn't apparent how much we all are concerned about our privacy; recently Google recently updated its terms of service deliberately highlighting the fact that it automatically scans our content, emails included. Fortunately for the company, this has not resulted in a serious drop in usage. In this moment in time, we are all becoming increasingly aware of where we're going. The problems arise when we don't think about the consequences.
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