Experts call this matrix “The Internet of Things,” and it is a hot topic whenever techies get together. When Rob van Kranenburg, a member of the European Commission’s IoT expert group, raises the possibility of “non-invasive neurosensors scanning your brain for over-activity in every street,” most people get a decidedly creepy feeling. Yet we seem ready to accept RFID chips in our passports, our clothing, and even in medical devices that go inside our bodies.110
Giving a unique Internet address to almost everything actually required changing the fundamental numbering system of the online world. Back in 1981, the designers of the Internet Protocol could not conceive of enough computers in the world to exceed the 4,294,967,296 Internet addresses they provided. But when you think about every car, toaster, streetlight, and school kid having one, we have pretty much run out.
The new system, called IPv6, theoretically accommodates a whopping 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 unique addresses, which should certainly allow all our garage doors, refrigerators, and toothbrushes to be connected and talk to each other. But should they?
Some sensors are clearly beneficial. The ones that alert you that your house is filling with smoke or carbon monoxide, for instance, are definitely your friends. The sensors that deploy the airbags in your car faster than human reaction time have saved countless lives. Yet those airbag sensors start to suggest the darker side of sensors.
If your car’s airbag sensor alerts emergency services that you have had a serious crash, this may well save your life. But what if it also records the detailed state of your body at the time of the accident? What if it quietly takes a breath sample or forwards your most recent cell phone calls to the authorities?
Writing about the near future, CNN predicts sensors in automobiles will measure vital signs “such as heart rate, eye movements and brain activity to detect everything from sleepiness to a heart attack.”111 The article also notes that “Nissan is experimenting with an array of technology that detects drunken driving. A sensor in the transmission shift knob can measure the level of alcohol in a driver’s sweat, while the car’s navigation system can sound an alarm if it detects erratic driving, such as weaving across lanes.”
One can easily imagine injured crash victims frantically pawing at the wires under the dashboard to abort certain revelatory transmissions. The scene gets even more unsettling if the sensors and their associated systems do their work behind the scenes, without your knowledge.
One of the creepiest features of the Internet of Things is how you may unwittingly become part of it yourself. Noting that GPS chips are now smaller than a match head, and keep getting cheaper, blogger John Brownlee predicts that “we’re fast zooming into a day and age where GPS nano-chips will be sprayable in a fine mist all over your body as you pass through airports customs.”112
It is enough to make you want to skip airports altogether and just jump in your car. That will come with its own surveillance issues, even if you obey all the laws and do not have an accident. License plate readers are proliferating, and there is even serious talk of tracking toll road users with them. While fugitive pursuits and speeding tickets would be the obvious applications of this kind of technology, there are more subtle ones. Oregon, realizing that fuel-efficient cars use less gasoline per mile, and that electric cars use none at all, is fretting about how to equitably collect road taxes. One possibility: attaching a meter to the car’s diagnostic system to track miles driven. Privacy advocates say that somebody would quickly decide to give drivers discounts for avoiding congested roads, creating a de facto GPS tracking system for drivers.113
We might well get to the point of coming home from a road trip to read our e-tickets, speeding fines, and road use charges. What about simply going for a walk? Authorities cannot tax our strolls yet, though they certainly might monitor them. Why would they do that? Perhaps to make sure we are getting the amount of daily exercise we promised our insurance company when we opted for the “active person” medical and life insurance policy. There are already plenty of apps that track your exercise, including some where you are fined if you do not meet your goals.
In reality, we would not want our sensors to tell us every time they take a reading or communicate with another system. Imagine if Google’s self-driving car pestered you every time its sophisticated sensors scanned the road ahead. This new fleet of driverless vehicles has already logged over half a million miles virtually accident free. Once you accept that your life is in the hands of a bunch of experimental technology, riding in one is reportedly quite relaxing.
The day will come when our cars drop us off at our destinations and then scurry off to park themselves. Perhaps they will have car-to-car conversations in the parkade. They might even joke about what we humans were doing in the back seat. Most of us would be fine with one car telling another “I’m about to vacate stall #216.” But what happens when your car brags about the maximum speed it has attained today, and a nearby police car is listening in to the vehicular banter?
Eric Gauthier was driving his new Pontiac Sunfire in downtown Montreal in April 2001 when his car struck another vehicle and killed its driver. With no witnesses, and a denial by Gauthier, police and the crown prosecutor sought to use data from the car’s event data recorder (EDR). It showed the car was traveling between 130 and 160 kilometers per hour, well over the speed limit.
The EDR, which Gauthier probably did not even realize he owned, records key parameters, such as speed and whether or not the brakes are applied whenever an airbag is deployed. The original intent was for engineers to analyze the statistics, but now police and prosecutors want to see information from an EDR accepted in court. The EDR data was admitted in the Gauthier case and he was convicted of dangerous driving.114
These automotive “black boxes” have also been accepted as evidence in the U.S., U.K., and Australia. There is certainly pressure to have them routinely accepted as evidence, since they are objective and probably more accurate than human memory.
Many drivers are actually inviting Big Brother under the hood in hope of saving money on car insurance. They are installing “driving monitors” such as the “Snapshot” from the Mayfield Village, OH-based Progressive Corporation. These tell your insurance company certain things about your driving such as the distance driven, when you travel (midnight to 4 AM is bad; the roads are full of drunks), and instances of “hard braking” (which they define as a change of more than seven miles per hour in one second).
While slamming on the brakes may mark you as an aggressive driver, there can be good reasons, such as avoiding a child who runs into the street or a last-minute red light. A number of bloggers who have installed the Progressive Snapshot say it has elevated their stress level while driving. Others have pointed out that this is really “usage-based” insurance since a major factor is the distance you drive per year.
According to a speaker at the Telematics Update conference in Chicago, the public’s concern about creepy government spying has led to privacy concerns about driving monitors. Joe Reifel, an AT Kearney partner, said that they are predicting an adoption rate of 22 percent over the next three years, down from a previous forecast of 30 percent.115 Snapshot records data through the OBDII diagnostic port, standard equipment on most cars manufactured since 1996, and sends it wirelessly to the company. Because of the legal concerns, they do not use GPS tracking, which could yield much more interesting information about where you are driving (such as nightclubs, liquor stores, and racetracks).
Progressive maintains that the Snapshot is a “win/win” because clients may get a discount, but no matter what it reveals, the Snapshot data alone will not make their rates go up. Prospective clients who test it for a month are then given a rate quote and the option to keep using the device.
A voluntary technology like this can easily become “de facto mandatory.” Since insurance spreads risk over a pool of drivers, declining to have the monitor installed may eventually lead companies to make assumpt
ions about your driving habits. There is no doubt that new cars will have the ability to collect and send out data about your driving habits. The big question is—who will have access to it?
The first documented use of evidence from a Snapshot device in court was in a murder trial in Parma Heights, OH. Michael Beard was accused of suffocating his infant daughter. He remembered that he was on the 30-day Progressive Snapshot trial, and the timestamps in it provided evidence (to the jury’s satisfaction) that he was not in the house long enough to do the deed.
Ironically, “Beard’s driving made him ineligible for any rewards,” according to a published report on the case. However, when he remembered that he had forgotten to take out the Snapshot, “I knew if I could retrieve the information I could prove I wasn’t there. Progressive told me that after so long they usually clear the information—but when they told me they still had it, ‘Oh my God’ was all I could say.”116
Progressive is not the only insurance company getting on the car tracker bandwagon. In 2010, Allstate announced a similar device it calls Drivewise. Like Progressive, Allstate avoids using GPS to track drivers. But that might change. Allstate’s CEO Tom Wilson has been quoted as saying “we’re going to do something with teen drivers so you can actually know where your kids are if they’re driving.”117
There are already several apps that do just that. Most of them rely on the fact that the average teenager would rather leave the house naked than without a cell phone. Nervous Moms and Dads can, openly or secretly, install GPS tracking software on their children’s phones. Life360, whose basic version is free, combines data from smartphones and car tracking devices, just like they use in the movies. Results are neatly displayed on a web page or via the smartphones app itself.
Most rental cars have a hidden tracking device so the company can find their vehicle if some deadbeat leaves it abandoned in a ditch. This is a separate GPS from the one that they rent to you at the counter. You can, and probably should, clear out the data from that one before you return the car. The other one is hidden and not accessible to the renter.
According to a report in the trade publication Auto Rental News, some agencies even have a remote kill switch on their vehicles. “Al Llanes of Global Rental Car of South Florida Inc. restricts his renters to the state of Florida,” the magazine reports.118 “He uses his tracking system to set up a virtual perimeter (or ‘geofence’) that alerts him when the state line is crossed.” What happens when the car goes over the line? The article says that Llanes remotely the disables the vehicle, and usually receives a phone call from the renter. He offers to restart the vehicle, but points out that there will be an extra mileage charge.
On the other side of the U.S., the out-of-state mileage charge struck renter Ron Lee, who was presented with a bill for over $1,700 for what he thought was about a $150 rental. The difference was an obscure dollar a mile surcharge for taking the car out of the state of California. The vehicle’s GPS ratted him out.119
Other rental car companies have tried adding “speeding surcharges” based on GPS data collected by the car. In a Connecticut case, an independent hearing officer estimated that the real cost of speeding in terms of extra wear and tear on the vehicle was thirty-seven cents, well below the $150 that the company was charging as a speeding penalty. Acme Rent-A-Car was ordered to stop fining speeders.120
Aside from privacy concerns, a bigger issue arises from what a rental car company might do with all that data it collects on its customers. Even in aggregated form, with no personal information attached, the data that rental companies collect can be very valuable. A log of precisely where thousands of rental cars have been driven, where they have stopped to admire the view, and where they buy gas would be very valuable to someone trying to choose a site for a roadside service area. Just as the ancillary revenue from running an airline reservation system can out-pace the profits from flying planes, selling data on customer behavior may become a major cash cow for car rental firms and other travel providers. With the right tools, someone might be able to “torture” the aggregated data to find out about a specific individual.
While working with employees of a mid-sized Canadian city, I asked them what disturbing things they see in their jobs. “City vehicles all have GPS sensors on them,” one employee piped up. “The snowplow drivers are afraid they’ll get in trouble if they take a break to warm up and grab a coffee.” Given that this city endures major snowstorms and Arctic temperatures, you might think a trip to Tim Horton’s is a reasonable request. The problem is that there is no clear policy. Drivers know the unflinching eye of the GPS system is always on them, and they fear it.
Public servants trying to solve real problems increasingly find themselves relying on technology that has the potential for serious abuse. A well-intentioned plan by British Columbia TransLink to use cell-phone “pings” from drivers’ phones to improve its real-time traffic maps raised privacy hackles. Even though the transit operator swore that nobody could be identified, people howled in protest.121
Intellistreets street lamps, manufactured by Illuminating Concepts of Farmington Hills, MI, dispense a lot more than illumination. They are actually sensor-enabled two-way communications devices. They can broadcast music, and even tell buildings to dim their lights when there are no people around. Security guards can talk through their “Concealed Placement Speakers” as disembodied voices.
The manufacturer’s home page also offers “a wide range of sensors (that) can be utilized for exciting pedestrian user interaction.” Accessories for your new streetlamp include CBRNE (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosives) detectors as well as a “shared data strategy (that) analyzes images between sensors and can direct PTZ (pan/tilt/zoom) cameras and situational awareness to the end user.” If your staff or other persons of interest (for example, prisoners) are sporting RFID tags, this system can also identify and track them for you.
I witnessed firsthand just how exciting, if only marginally effective, a talking security system can be while walking through a public housing project in Washington, D.C. Probably unable to afford those $3,000 streetlamps, the complex was using old fashioned security cameras with nearby wall mounted loudspeakers, all connected to an unseen guard room. “Hey, you in the red hoodie—no skateboarding here.” A shocked look from the kid was followed by … more skateboarding. I did not stick around to see if live security action followed.
The U.K. has also dabbled in talking surveillance cameras, even holding “competitions for children to become the voice of the camera.”122 Presumably having your grandkid tell you to pick up after your dog will have a stronger impact than the lady who tells you to “Mind the Gap” or the man who urges you to “Please Stand Clear of the Closing Doors.”
I give a lot of talks to school groups, and often learn amazing things from them. One eager sixth grader asked me, “Did you know that there are cameras in the eyes of the mannequins at The Bay?” referring to Canada’s iconic department store. I said I didn’t think that was true and he quickly replied, “Yes, there are! That’s how my sister got busted for shoplifting.” The teacher stepped in to end this over-sharing of family secrets.
If we allow what technology makes possible, your nearest streetlight or trash bin may have the same capabilities envisioned by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham for his Panopticon, the perfectly designed prison in which jailers manage their charges by the simple stratagem of being all-seeing while remaining unseen themselves.
Yet, it would be oversimplifying to suggest that we are moving to a world of government wardens and citizen prisoners. After all, many of the security measures that are put in place are put there at the request of citizens like us to attempt to deter crime, terrorism, and other bad behavior.
I once got to chat with Anthony Zuiker, creator and executive producer of the CSI:Crime Scene Investigation television dramas. He assured me that “everything we do on the show is based in science, but sometimes we do speed it up for television.�
�� He also said he is well aware of the “CSI effect”—the rising expectation that high tech forensics will be available and applied even in minor cases. People who have a hundred-dollar GPS unit stolen from their car are thus outraged when police don’t dust for fingerprints or search for traces of the DNA left by the thief.
Our growing reliance on “always on surveillance” is illustrated by the tragic case of teenager Kendrick Johnson, who was found dead, wrapped in a gym mat, at his school in Georgia. His parents demanded the video from the school’s surveillance cameras, even launching a Twitter campaign with the hashtag #giveusthetapes when they were not immediately provided.
When police released the evidence, there were gaps that some said were due to the fact that the cameras were motion activated. However, the victim’s parents believed that there was tampering. CNN took the tapes to Seattle-based Grant Fredericks, a certified forensic video analyst who also played a role in the analysis of the Vancouver 2011 riot tapes. Fredericks found that the videos did not appear to have been edited, but he also questioned the quality of the data since it was not provided in its original form.123 We not only expect that surveillance footage will be there to help us solve crimes—we get angry when it does not show us what we want to see.
Cameras and sensors in smartphones have already been pressed into service as medical devices, testing eyesight (Vision Test 3.0 was the iPhone “medical app of 2010”), blood pressure, glucose levels, and even heart rhythms. However, no smartphones sensors can approach the sheer existential weirdness of the “smart toilets” sold mainly in Japan. One, from Toto, weighs you when you sit down, checks your body temperature, and does on-the-spot urinalysis. Some of its throne-like competitors will also send all of this information electronically to your computer or directly to your doctor’s office.
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