The trend that I selected was predicted in 2007 in World Trends and Forecast. This prediction has a little age behind it. I find it interesting to look at some trends that have started to show progress in become true. Maybe I am still suffering for the sting of not having flying cars, by 1990. In 2007 it was predicted that the development of wireless communication would challenge our existing notions of privacy. Our privacy will slowly disappear. If it disappears slowly enough we may not even care. What is the impact to our privacy when the cost of a camera is just a few dollars, the size is as smalls an eraser and there are hundreds of millions or billions of them in circulation? What is the impact on our privacy when everybody is carrying a GPS receiver that is tied to the Internet? What is the impact to our privacy when we pay all our bills, perform all correspondence, and view all our entertainment on the internet? What is the impact when all of our medical records, car records, and school records are connected into the internet? What is the impact with the cost of a terabyte is less than $100. What is the impact when face recognition software is near perfect? What is the impact when you can do picture content search? Answering any one of these questions starts to paint a picture of the impact on our privacy; the answer to all of these questions paints a picture where privacy may not exist. Today is not that we cannot gather much of this information. What keeps our privacy is the fact we are part of a huge crowd. We just cannot wade through all of it to paint a complete picture of an individual. It is too fragmented on different incompatible systems. Overtime search engines will get better, integration between systems will improve, and tools to combine all of the pieces will start to emerge. When that occurs a complete profile on an individual will be simple.
There are forces that both support and derail our privacy. On the technology front greater computing power, larger and cheaper storage, and greater interconnection of systems will help enable systems to piece together all of your information into a single profile. You add this together with improvements in face recognition, side-channel tracking, cookie tracking, government systems, security systems, and all the rest of the devices that watch you it seems that shortly there will be algorithms that will be able to create these individual profiles. A second force that drives the technology forward to remove your privacy is economic. There are many companies that are working to build profiles on you. Some of these companies plan and will do it in a way to help you. Their motivations are good and honest. They want to be able to predict what music you want to listen to or what shows to watch on NetFlix. They want to create an accurate credit score. However, as the technology gets built it will be used for other purposes. The bad people will get the same technology. It will be used for bad purposes. Today, I wonder how much information a person sitting at a desk at Verizon can gather about an individual. Unless the usage is encrypted, I would expect they could trap every IP packet the person sends both via their ISP landline and their wireless IP connection.
There are also forces attempting to protect an individual’s privacy. To start with there are technology forces that are starting to gain ground. A group of people attempting to push companies to encrypt their internet connect published an incredibility easy FireFox plug in that allows anyone to highjack user names, password, and sessions. The plugin is called Fire Sheep. 24 hours after the launch of the plugin there were over 100,000 downloads. I don’t know what the total number of download is but it may be in the millions. There has been some positive movement. The plugin was available for download in October 2010 and on January 27th 2011 Facebook announced that they will start using HTTPS, an encrypted page interface. This really brings into point two forces that are attempting to slow or protect a person’s privacy. There is a social force of people working to protect a person’s privacy. There is also a technical force that is helping those that want to protect their privacy. The third force is again economical. It seems the economical force always plays both sides of a controversy. Companies will and are working to help people protect their privacy. However, it always seems that those helping to protect privacy are behind those that are attempting erode privacy. However, the force is there.
Protecting privacy will become a growing challenge due to new technologies. A wireless device in your shoes to record your miles while jogging could be turned into a stalker’s handy tracking device. And cameras have become small enough to be disguised as shirt buttons to invade people’s privacy on the sly. Engineers are scrambling to counter that trend with privacy protection devices, such as a light-absorbing capacitor that blocks the signals of digital cameras. — World Trends & Forecasts, May-June 2007, pp. 12, 13
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