InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
January 10, 2000
A Question Of Privacy
Sometime during the next few years, many things in our lives that heretofore have not been computerized will become so. If you believe the visionaries at many major research institutions, all kinds of everyday objects will be computerized or will become computers themselves. Such things as light switches, refrigerators, garage doors, stoves, stereos, and TVs, as well as wallets and credit cards. You may soon even "wear" computers that track your movements and location, your pulse rate and temperature.
Sound futuristic? It's already happening. On a recent visit to Microsoft's research lab in Cambridge, England, a researcher I met with was wired with a tiny device she designed to monitor basic physical data such as pulse rate and keep a digital diary throughout the course of the day. That information could be used to notify your cellular phone that you're busy if someone calls while you are bicycling to work, and thus could automatically route the caller to voice mail. (For more on the project, see http://www.research.microsoft.com/hwsystems/)
In fact, when her bicycle was stolen, the researcher, Lyndsay Williams, was able to tell the police exactly when she had arrived at work that morning and when she left the building that night and discovered the bike missing--her pulse rate dropped when she got off the bike at work that morning, so she was able to fix the time exactly.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab are working on computerized clothing, as farfetched as that might seem. Other labs, such as those at Carnegie Mellon University, have also done significant work on wearable computers. These newly computerized devices will each provide information streams. Your car will have its own "auto PC" with a global positioning system transponder. Maybe your cell phone or your wallet will, too.
Additionally, some of the other technologies under development include sensing devices that could be located in each room of your home or workplace that "know" when you are present. These could be cameras running in conjunction with visual-recognition systems, or they could be infrared sensors or radio-frequency devices that track an identification pin somewhere on your person.
There are lots of benefits that can be projected from these kinds of developments, such as knowing what room your children are playing in or what they are watching on TV while you are in the kitchen. Your co-workers would know where you were if they needed to arrange an impromptu meeting. One Microsoft researcher who has been experimenting with his home in the Seattle area is working with a system that, among other things, will let him check from work to make sure he didn't leave the stove on or the garage door open when he left the house.
However, as the Ghost of Christmas Future pointed out, the future does not have to turn out well, or badly, for anyone. That is up to each of us.
Think about what could become possible once--and if--all those computer systems in the world that know some little thing about you begin to talk among themselves. It would be the electronic equivalent of what might happen if all the people you used to date got together to gossip about you and share your deepest, most personal secrets.
One important issue that is still being argued is who owns those data streams. Do you? Or do various vendors of products or services?
You may recall that 10 years ago, Lotus planned to release a CD-ROM called "Marketplace" that would contain all kinds of personal demographic and financial data on 100 million or so Americans, which Lotus had purchased from one of the major credit-reporting firms. Even though Lotus claimed that no one could get at your specific financial or personal data, a purchaser could generate lists of people who, say, fit into categories such as "income over $100,000." Consumers were outraged and Lotus canceled plans for the disc.
Since then, however, the collection of personal data by all kinds of vendors has increased dramatically, and many of those vendors still believe they have a right to do with that data whatever they desire. Several banks were recently rebuked for making money by selling such data. The credit-reporting companies have also maintained that, since they gathered the information, they own your credit data, not you. How about your health insurer or your pharmacy? How about your local telephone company, your long-distance provider, and your cable company? How about your Internet service provider? "Cookies" may not specifically identify you, but there are ways to figure out who you are and to track your "anonymous" rovings around the Web.
Even more insidious in the long-term is the thought that all of that information might eventually be collected in one place in real time and tied together into a more complete, and living, dossier than anyone has ever been able to assemble before. Think I'm just being paranoid? I'm not one for believing in black helicopters, assassination conspiracies, the Boys from Brazil, or the Trilateral Commission. But I am a believer in basic human greed and the principle that, if there is some advantage to be gained, there will always be people and companies who will endeavor to make money off it.
If those matters aren't settled, it remains an open question whether information such as where you choose to hang out in the office or what you do in your own home (remember those cameras to help you track your kids?) belongs to you or to someone else. A home computing environment researcher recently seriously suggested to me that, in the future, you could have complete privacy if you had enough money, but that others with fewer financial resources might work some tradeoff of less privacy for less cost--sort of like having to pay for an unlisted phone number today. I don't know about you, but I find that idea disquieting.
What I'm suggesting, then, is that you, as IT staffers, make a New Year's resolution to think about these issues when you are building applications that integrate lots of data streams or do data mining. Take time to think about the potential long-term consequences. I'll wager that your privacy is as important to you as mine is to me. And remember that what the Ghost of Christmas Future shows us doesn't have to come true. It's all up to us.
ow that New Year's Eve is over and the world didn't end, planes didn't fall out of the sky, and somehow that pesky government continues to function, it seems like a good enough time to think about New Year's resolutions.
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