Originally written 2/23/2012
Two thoughts on
the innovation of technology came together in my head recently. One is the
impact of social networking on the amount of stored personal data available.
When one died a generation ago the amount of data generated by and about an
average person may be enough to fill a file drawer. Some pictures, some
letters, medical records and the like--enough to get a general idea, maybe
enough to write a respectable obituary or biography. The generations living
today have a vast and ever-increasing amount of data about them stored in the
cloud in the form of pictures, videos, blog posts, etc. The direction we are
going is ultimately to have a complete copy of our memories, personalities, and
more in digital form. As computers get better and better at processing large
amounts of data there are interesting ramifications. Ever thought about how
that info get’s used after you die?
The other
thought on innovation was sparked by Google’s latest news maker, a heads up
display that integrates the power of smart phones with augmented reality
technology. Basically, they want to put all the information available on the
internet directly on top of what you are looking at at the moment. Wearing
Google glasses you could, for example, look at the products in a store and see
product information floating above each item or price comparisons from other
stores. You could look at a restaurant sign and see reviews and
recommendations. The possibilities are endless.
When I put these
two thoughts together along with the fact that more and more social content is
becoming searchable and computers are getting better and better at interpreting
social content I begin to see a world that is hardly recognizable. A world in
which there are increasingly less secrets. The anonymity that comes with being
a face in the crowd diminishes greatly. Here’s what I mean. Let’s assume you
had some magical Facebook glasses that could bring up the Facebook profile of
any person you looked at. Instantly, you would have access to who this person
was friends with, where they worked, what they looked like in high school, what
they had for breakfast in 2007. Assuming everyone adopted the technology and
the glasses carried your id and location, as I’m sure they would, you would be
able to enter a crowded room and scan the room for “suggested friends”. The
social implications are mind-boggling.
Currently we
seem to have a large amount of control over our information though it is much less
than it was ten or even five years ago. At this point the rule of thumb is, if
you don’t want people to know about it, don’t put it on the internet. But the
direction of information technology and trends in marketing suggests that it
will get more and more difficult to keep corporations, government entities, and
even benign social networks out of your personal information. If you carry a
smartphone or even use a credit card there are a lot of steps you would have to
take to keep your location, purchase history, and other information to
yourself. If the people around you carry smartphones then there’s really
nothing you can do to keep your image off the internet. I received a text from
an acquaintance the other day with a picture he had taken of his son in a
restaurant. There I was in the background. We hadn’t noticed each other at the
time, but when he looked back at his pictures he noticed me there.
Is this bad? It
got me to thinking historically. Is this really such a huge shift for the human
race? A few generations ago most people lived in small communities or in a
rural setting where their family or tribe was the only social interaction they
had. Secrets were considered dangerous to the community. Privacy only existed
inside your head and even that wasn’t safe from the probing questions of your
elders. The result was social conformity and greater checks and balances over
morality. If a man abused his family, it would be found out, and he would be
dealt with. If a woman lied to her neighbor everyone would soon know about it
and she would face the consequences. What if the proliferation of widely
available personal information is actually bringing us to a state of greater
community and the ideal of a “global village”? Privacy groups assume a lack of
privacy is a bad thing, but what will it really lead to?
If history is a
guide then none of us know.
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