In the next decade, several Internet of Things initiatives will converge to provide the technological foundation to enable our identity and movements to be monitored, tracked, recorded, and archived in such a way that they can be easily retrieved for subsequent comparison and analysis. A combination of six converging trends will usher us into a brave new world in which most devices on the street and in the home will constantly record human activity:
> Mobile phones, especially smartphones open to Wi-Fi networks
> Global Positioning System (GPS) and other location-tracking technology in mobile devices
> Ever-smaller high-resolution security cameras and web cameras
> Facial recognition, gait recognition, license plate tracking, and other personally identifiable tracking technology used in public spaces by law-enforcement agencies
> Life logging, face tagging, and photo sharing on social networks
> Surveillance systems deployed at massive scale by national intelligence agencies Some of this surveillance will occur with our consent, some of it will take place without permission, and most of it will remain unnoticed by those observed.
By 2025, it is likely that most (or perhaps all!) of human activity in urban centers will be recorded with a degree of precision that is very difficult to imagine today. One reason this notion is hard to accept is that it reverses the experience our grandparents had during the previous century of migration
from rural areas to cities. Their experience fostered the conviction that cities are zones of anonymity.
Ubiquitous surveillance technology in our time will betray those convictions.
Much has been made of the intrusions into and erosion of personal privacy in the digital domain.
We know that the intelligence services of many countries conduct mass-scale electronic surveillance on private communication by citizens. We know that major banks aggregate data about consumer purchase habits and sell it to marketers, big retail chains, and manufacturers. We know the Federal Communications Commission fined telecommunications giants Verizon and AT&T for breaking the rules on handling consumer data. And we know that Experian has partnered with Facebook,
combining the giant credit reporting agency’s information about financial records, property
ownership, credit, and vehicle leases, with the social media network’s data about sexual preferences, relationship status, travel, and hobbies to provide sophisticated customer targeting. Everyone, it seems, is in a rush to vacuum up our personal data.
Several observers, notably journalist Glenn Greenwald in his TED talk “Why Privacy Matters,”
have drawn the parallel to the Panopticon, an invention by a peculiar eighteenth-century social reformer named Jeremy Bentham, whose preserved body is on display in a wooden cabinet at
University College London. Bentham’s invention was proposed as a humane alternative to the brutal punishments of the British penal code in the early 1800s. In Bentham’s view, miscreants would modify their own behavior if they were confined in a circular prison with a tower in the center. No prisoner could be certain when a guard might be watching from the central tower and therefore, Bentham surmised, they would all conform to what they presumed the invisible watchers would expect. This model prison was known as the Panopticon.
What observers like Greenwald find so objectionable about this type of prison is the psychological effect of the ubiquitous surveillance. The prisoners grow to internalize the rules and then they self- censor in order to comply. Greenwald draws a parallel to the constant surveillance of the National Security Agency (NSA) and concludes that intelligence agencies and law enforcement organizations have in effect turned the Internet into a digital Panopticon. He argues that people in digital
environments have actually changed their behavior since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden released the revelations about wholesale government spying.
Critics decry the corrosive effect of such wholesale surveillance on free speech, political speech, the right to organize and formulate lawful political opposition, and the right to unconditional self- expression, that was an early hallmark of the World Wide Web. Now, most of us make no distinction between spying by intelligence agencies or marketers or social networks or data brokers. We assume this passive surveillance is a baseline condition of digital media. What’s missing from this critique is the fact that this outcome is optional. If consumers preferred to place a value on their privacy, they could adjust their privacy settings, encrypt their communications, manage their passwords, or even vote for different elected officials. Few of us do those things. Instead, most of us freely post intimate details of our lives on social networks though few of us would ever tell a marketer or researcher the status of our relationships, our career, our children, nor divulge our sexual preferences, our
educational and career history, or our private habits of consumption.
Most people say they would prefer private email and web-browsing sessions, but our actions speak louder. We routinely opt for the free webmail, the free browser, the free mobile app, the free social network, the free online news, the free collaboration software, the free storage, the free communications, the free photo album, the free messaging. We freely trade our privacy for
convenience. Even when it comes to government spying, most of us complain but reluctantly concede that it is necessary for national security. We can’t be bothered to protest, to complain to our elected representatives, or to organize to roll back the intrusions on our civil liberties. We now live in an opt-in Panopticon that we have created—and freely chosen—for ourselves.
THE INTERNET OF THINGS WILL PROBABLY WIN US OVER IN THE END
Given the degree to which people are already subject to tracking in both the real world and digital media, it’s probable that there won’t be an armed insurrection when IoT blends real-world devices together with digital media. The success or failure of IoT will depend mostly upon execution. How much value will we get in exchange for revealing the intimate truth about our habits at home, in the bathroom, in the living room, and in the car? If consumers feel they are getting sufficient benefit from the devices, they’ll trade away data and accept a measure of constant surveillance. In fact, we may come to expect and even welcome life in an interactive world because of the convenience and optimization it will offer us.
A thorough process of reinvention is underway now across many very different product categories.
This transformation is at the core of many currently trendy marketing concepts promoted by the high- tech industry, including smart homes, smart cars, and smart cities.
> Smartwatches, smart jewels, and other wearable gizmos are conditioning us to the perception of computers-as-accessories that record body data such as sweat, pulse, and temperature.
> The Quantified Self movement recontextualizes the human body as an information field to be mined. Already, Fitbit and other fitness wearables give us feedback about how many calories we burn on a run, how many steps we climb, how many miles we walk.
> Networked home appliances, kitchen gadgets, and climate control systems will transform the old deaf-and-dumb house into a smart home that monitors the stability and performance of these systems, conforming to our habits and alerting us when there is a problem.
> Connected cars will transform the automobile from mere transportation to a mobile computing platform that records our street-level activity and builds a prediction model about our local travel habits.
> Medical technology is swiftly moving towards “insideables” and “implantables” that will enable physicians to detect individual illness sooner, and harvest health trends from a large cross-section of the population who consent to share anonymized data.
> Responsive outdoor signage, billboards, and posters will welcome us to a responsive urban environment.
What unifies all of these disparate marketing and infrastructure programs is that they tend to
involve the same general tactics, namely embedding a miniature computer inside of a familiar product to enable new functionality and then offering a mobile app to connect, communicate, manage, and personalize it. Whether it is a car or a refrigerator or a drill, every smart device will have an Internet protocol (IP) layer and they will all connect to some form of network, either a local wireless network or the Internet in order to track, record, and respond to ambient conditions. The really smart
companies will work with developers to build a set of applications on top of the smart infrastructure.
Consumer expectations are shifting. We are becoming accustomed to interacting with the inanimate
objects around us and soon we will depend on their intelligence. We will come to expect a measure of interactivity in our retail shopping centers, malls, arenas, and public spaces.