 |
| © Provided by The Next Web |
By Gary Eastwood, The Next Web
The rise of the digital era has brought with it many wondrous changes
to our daily lives, not least of which the fact that we now carry
digital assistants with us everywhere we go in the form of smartphones,
tablets, and laptop computers. The rapid proliferation of everyday
digital devices and the rise of new smart devices, which are more
capable than ever before, carries with it worrying connotations about
surveillance just as equally as it does positive ones of progress.
Will our smart devices become a massive surveillance network? You
need not look to the future with dystopian fears when it comes to your
smart devices – governments are already using them to spy on you today.
Our smart devices track our every move
It’s
indisputable that contemporary smart devices are often built with
advanced surveillance capabilities that keep track of you wherever you
go; after all, if your smart device isn’t aware of where you (and it)
are, it can’t offer you a myriad of useful services we’ve all come to
rely upon, likely timely weather updates in our nearby area or
directions to a local pub. Given that surveillance capabilities are
built into these devices from the get-go, it’s thus only a matter of
time that our smart devices come together to create a surveillance grid
that tracks our every move and digital inquiry.
Around
the world today, we can already isolate a number of worrying examples
of massive surveillance networks, and they’re not exclusive to
totalitarian regimes in lesser developed portions of the world, either.
In contemporary Britain there’s one surveillance camera for every 11 people,
for instance, illustrating the rapid rise of the surveillance state in
industrialized Western democracies. Elsewhere, security services and
local law enforcement authorities are also starting to warm up to the
idea of using more devices to surveil the general population.
The
rise of police body cameras has soothed many concerns surrounding police
brutality, for instance, but when facial recognition technology grows
so compact and efficient to work through those devices they’ll soon be
cataloging the face and identity of everyone who passes a police officer
or checkpoint on the street, for instance. Smart devices in our homes,
like the virtual smart home assistants Alexa and Google Home, will also
begin to pry into our personal lives more and more.
It’s only going to get worse from here
The
most daunting challenge before privacy advocates today is the fact that
invasive technology is only going to get more advanced from here,
necessitating that it will become easier and easier to establish a
surveillance network just about anywhere. Even our homes won’t be safe
sooner rather than later; Amazon recently filed
for a patent to detect user illnesses by analyzing the emotional state
of their voice, illustrating how awesome and infiltrative potential
these smart devices have.
When all of our smart devices are
connected to one another and those belonging to our friends and families
around us, they can be used to create informative grids and deduce
everyday patterns that reveal who we are as individuals. Once
authorities realize how useful virtual home assistants can be solving murder cases,
there may even be concerted government efforts to sponsor digital
assistants everywhere to expedite investigations and information
gathering.
The massive surveillance networks that countless
dystopian authors have warned us about aren’t around the corner –
they’re already here. The digital technology that exist in this day and
age is already sufficient to establish creeping surveillance networks by
tapping into the power of smart devices, and privacy advocates
everywhere should be preparing themselves for bitter fights yet to come.
COMMENTS