Data, Surveillance, and a Broader Approach to Understanding

We are amidst a technological revolution with an unclear and rapidly approaching future. As this future becomes a tangible and very physical reality, what follows is a new marketplace of information and interaction with smart technology as the medium of exchange. There are new players and new risks. Gary Kovac, CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, says that the internet has opened up a new world to us, but our privacy is the price that we are more and more being asked to pay for this connectedness. He elaborates on this point in a TED Talk from February 2012 titled “Tracking our online trackers”:

Today, what many of us would love to believe is that the Internet is a private place; it's not. And with every click of the mouse and every touch of the screen, we are like Hansel and Gretel leaving breadcrumbs of our personal information everywhere we travel through the digital woods. We are leaving our birthdays, our places of residence, our interests and preferences, our relationships, our financial histories, and on and on it goes.

Image Source: Flickr

Kovac says that sharing data is not necessarily a bad thing when the data being shared is done so after giving consent, but he says a problem arises when “I don’t know and when I haven’t been asked[explicitly for consent]...It's a phenomenon on the Internet today called behavioral tracking, and it is very big business.” He goes on to say, “I am being stalked across the Web. And why is this happening? Pretty simple -- it's huge business. The revenue of the top handful of companies in this space is over 39 billion dollars today.”

But it is not just businesses who have an interest in collecting large amounts of data about individuals and their habits. The Edward Snowden leaks have shown us that government also has been collecting large amounts of personal data--foreign and domestic--and done so without public knowledge or consent. The first of these leaked documents to be published by the Guardian was a top secret court order, which the Guardian says showed for the first time that "under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing." The data being collected under this order is called "metadata": data that describes data –information about the time and location of a phone call or email, but not the actual contents of that message. Here is an excerpt from the Verizon Court Order for “telephony metadata”:

Telephony metadata includes comprehensive communications routing information, including but not limited to session identifying information (e.g., originating and terminating telephone number, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, International Mobile station Equipment Identity (IMEI) number, etc.), trunk identifier, telephone calling card numbers, and time and duration of call. (page 2) 

This is just the first stop on a long trail of government surveillance and the collection of "metadata". To be able to address issues like privacy rights and government secrecy we must first take a step back and look at the broader picture of the environment that this is all happening in and the way technology has shaped it. Perhaps the real questions transcend the familiar push and pull between people and government or corporations.

How is today any different from the way things have been in the past?

 

‘Data’ is not a new concept to humanity. It is the building blocks of information and knowledge. Surveillance and government secrecy are not new things either. What is new is technology and the ways that humans can use technology in order to process and analyze data at a rate and volume unimaginable in the past. We can collect more real-time data and in more ways than ever before.

Tiny wireless sensor (CC3000 Module Internals). Source: Flickr

There is a term known as "the Internet of Things". It was originally coined in 1999 by Kevin Ashton, executive director of the Auto-ID Center at MIT. The Internet of Things (IoT) described a ubiquitous computing paradigm: an emerging paradigm for interaction between humans and computers in a world where more and more computing capabilities are showing up everywhere and anywhere. It is essentially a network of physical objects or "things" embedded with electronics, software, sensors and connectivity that enable it to exchange data with the manufacturers, the users and/or other connected devices. Our "smart" phones are some of these objects. In a paper that was prepared for the 1st Berlin Symposium on Internet and Society the authors, when exploring definitions of IoT, say that "it is possible to consider the internet of things as the superset of all objects that are uniquely identifiable by electro-magnetic means and for which it is possible to specify a semantic and/or behavior.”[1]

What is the "Internet of Things"? How is it already a reality; how will it, how has it, and how could it change our society?

The difficulty in asking these questions is that there are many terms besides and surrounding "the Internet of Things" that describe changes that people are aware of. There are many perspectives at different levels and scales with regard to seeing and shaping this future. 

[1] Van Kranenburg, Rob, et al. "The Internet of things." A critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID, Network Notebooks 2 (2011).