Technocreep

by Thomas P. Keenan

  A flurry of news stories in 2005 suggested that there would soon be a big market for RFID tagged baby clothing.145 However, the idea never caught on, and has been basically superseded by the ability to track people with smartphones apps such as Life360. Not only will that one alert you to their whereabouts, it will even provide a warning when your children are approaching a known crime scene.

  Technology has outstripped human bodies in countless ways. Cars move us faster than we can possibly run. Computers do complex arithmetic computations fast and flawlessly. IBM’s Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Gary Kasparov who, in a typically human reaction, accuses it of cheating.

  Vernor Vinge, Raymond Kurzweil, and other thinkers tell us that we are rapidly approaching “The Singularity,” a point in time at which artificial intelligence will surpass human brainpower in important ways.

  It is not obvious that we will even know when the machines have outstripped us. We also have no idea how they will treat us. Some science fiction writers predict that humans will be treated as a virus to be eradicated; others suggest that we will make excellent pets for our digital masters.

  Most of us have already reached a kind of personal “privacy singularity.” In some very important ways, our technologies, taken together, know more about us than our most significant human friend or lover. This is totally understandable, since we spend so much time exchanging information through technology. They are our electronic confidants, our faithful servants, and in some cases, two-timing spies.

  Every time you “Look Inside” a book, “Like” a Facebook post, “Friend” someone new, send an email, or log on from a different place, you are leaving a digital trail that is being scrutinized to learn more about you. Techniques with exotic names like predictive analytics, k-means clustering, and cross-platform tracking provide deep insights into our thoughts and behavior. While human relationships may come and go, your online presence is forever.

  For instance, let us compare the world of online shopping with going to a brick-and-mortar store. If you shop on a site like Amazon, you will undoubtedly be reminded about items that you looked at but did not purchase.

  That’s fair game. After all, a good salesperson in an upscale ­clothing store would also remember you and show you that tie you passed on last week, as well as others like it. The salesclerk would let you in on special sales and perhaps offer you some sort of incentive to buy it. So does Amazon. So far, the Internet is just mimicking real world commerce.

  But what if that store clerk compared notes with the other retailers in a shopping mall to build a detailed dossier on you? What if conversations you had while walking between stores were mined for intelligence about your buying habits? A growing network of data partnerships is making this kind of snooping the norm in the online world. You probably agreed to it when you clicked on some Terms and Conditions that you did not really read.

  As one blogger reported, “an image of some headphones I looked at (on) an e-commerce site ended up staring back at me from an ad on Facebook later that day.”146 Dave Obasanjo goes on to explain that was made possible by a system called Facebook Exchange (FBX). This is a real-time bidding platform where companies, like headphone maker SkullCandy, purchase access to your eyeballs through sponsored ads on Facebook.

  Google’s Gmail serves up ads targeted to your interests, which it can determine by having programs scan the content of your emails for certain keywords. Google notes that you gave them permission to do this when you signed up for Gmail. But what if a non-Gmail user sends an email to somebody on Gmail? The sender never agreed to those terms of service. A lawsuit against Google suggested this was a form of wiretapping. In reply, the company’s lawyers asserted that they have that right to scan those emails anyway.

  Google’s Motion to Dismiss stated that “Just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague cannot be surprised that the recipient’s assistant opens the letter, people who use web-based email today cannot be surprised if their communications are processed by the recipient’s ECS provider in the course of delivery.”147

  Still, this does feel like a human salesperson trading on private conversations you had in the hall, or digging through your garbage. Even if the judges rule that the law is on Google’s side here, that may just mean that the laws do not reflect our common sense understanding of what privacy is and how it should be protected.

  The other major force in automating the online sales process is to use every scrap of information about your friends and their likes and dislikes. Amazon now alerts you if any of your Facebook connections have written reviews of products you are looking at. They also show you what “Customers Who Bought Items in Your Recent History Also Bought.”

  This is their “item-to-item collaborative filtering” algorithm at work. It attempts to figure out what you would like to buy based on the behavior of other people who are somehow like you. The success of this technique depends on having a good way to define “people like me” and a large and rich data source upon which to base recommendations. According to its April 13, 2012 Privacy Policy, Amazon collects the following automatically from each web visitor: “The Internet protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the Internet; login; e-mail address; password; computer and connection information such as browser type, version, and time zone setting, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system, and platform; purchase history, which we sometimes aggregate with similar information from other customers to create features like Top Sellers; the full Uniform Resource Locator (URL) clickstream to, through, and from our Web site, including date and time; cookie number; products you viewed or searched for; and the phone number you used to call our 800 number.”

  Amazon also collects your “length of visits to certain pages” which does have a certain “looking over my shoulder” feel to it. Then there is all the information you provided voluntarily. Did you write a review of a product? Put something on a Wish List? Ask to be reminded of a special occasion? It’s all in your personal file at Amazon. The divergence from the friendly necktie salesman becomes even greater when you realize that this file is for keeps (unless you change your email address and even then you might be linked by IP address or credit card).

  The computers at Amazon and Google usually have no reason to forget or purge any data, and every reason to hang onto it in perpetuity, a license you explicitly granted them when you agreed to their terms and conditions. You also agreed to have your data shared, sold, aggregated with the data of others, and sold again.

  The power of social data is illustrated by the fact that some hotel chains employ full-time social media specialists to help manage their online reputations, and to respond to negative reviews on sites like Tripadvisor with comments like “yes we had some bed bugs but we’ve changed all the mattresses.”

  I use an itinerary management site called Worldmate, and always steer clear of the “Share with your friends on Facebook” button. I don’t necessarily want a bunch of people I barely know having my detailed itinerary.

  Over at Google-owned YouTube, it has been reported by insiders that “recommendations account for about 60% of all video clicks from the home page.”148 The Google employees who wrote this paper also note that “many of the interesting videos on YouTube have a short life cycle going from upload to viral in the order of days requiring constant freshness of recommendation.”

  If you want to see how much data is being collected on you, and how you are being tracked, just install a free application call Ghostery. It discloses, for example, that even the staid Government of Canada website is feeding information to Google Analytics, in return for what they get back—information on visitors to their web pages. And www.cnn.com is positively bleeding information about you all over the place. Accessed from New York City, Ghostery reported forty-three trackers on that site, some with revealing names like Visual Revenue and Facebook Beacon, but also some cryptic ones like Moat and Rocket Fuel.

  The documentary film Terms and Condi
tions May Apply includes an estimate of the annual value of the data you give up to Google by using their “free” services. How the film’s producers came up with the number $500 is as shrouded in mystery as the internal workings of Google, but there is little doubt that we are becoming more valuable every year as advertisers move from the traditional “show it to everybody and hope someone buys” model to highly targeted ads.

  An astounding number of the creepiest technologies come from Japan, where they are accepted with a remarkable sangfroid, or perhaps just naughty delight. This is, after all, the country that had to invoke its “Antique Dealings Law” in 1993 to curb the sale of used schoolgirl panties in automated machines.149 Cognoscenti say you can still find those machines in rural Japan, and pictures of them are preserved for posterity in YouTube videos.150 Then again, with e-commerce sites like myusedpantystore.com, why would anyone even bother looking for a vending machine?

  What could be technocreepier than buying schoolgirl panties from a vending machine on the way to work? Perhaps, having your boss catch you sniffing them in your cubicle.

  Tokyo-based KDDI Corporation has crafted an exquisitely creepy piece of software that might allow just that. It uses an employee’s smartphones to figure out what the person is doing on company time, on a second-by-second basis. According to Addy Dugdale’s piece in Fast Company, the “software is embedded into an employee’s mobile that is connected to a server that analyzes their movements via the phone’s accelerometer. At first, workers will have to input just what action they are performing into their mobiles so that their movements can be interpreted. The system becomes more accurate as time goes on, recognizing each individual’s movements.”151 Employers do have many legal rights with respect to pieces of technology they supply to employees, but checking how your phone is jiggling or not jiggling certainly borders on the totalitarian.

  I knew an engineer who could cobble together just about anything electrical or electronic. His front lawn had an elaborate system of sensors to detect intruders. “I didn’t want to hit them with missiles or lasers or anything,” he told me, “so if somebody stepped on my lawn the sprinkler in that zone would turn on. They knew that I knew they were there, and that was enough.”

  He also figured out how to detect, based on body size, which family member had just entered a room. Not only did his contraption flick on the lights, it turned on the TV, thoughtfully tuning it to the person’s favorite channel.

  “Get rid of that or I’m getting a divorce,” his wife told him. “It creeps me out.”

  In a similar fashion, bars such as the Beantown Pub in Boston have been equipped with a suite of cameras that do “facial ­detection.”152 The goal is not to figure out who you are, but to ­figure out how busy the place is, as well as the ratio of males to females currently in the establishment and their approximate ages. It would be a small step to add a deeper analysis of physical ­characteristics, and undoubtedly some entrepreneur is working on just such a system.

  Passwords, with all their shortcomings, do a reasonable job of protecting our workplace systems and even let us do online shopping and banking. But if Motorola’s Research Division (now owned by Google) has its way, you may take a “password pill” every day. Designed to pass through your digestive system, it will emit radio waves and relieve of us of the chore of generating and remembering good passwords, as well as the guilt if we use “123456” or “snoopy.”

  The pill has been hailed as a great solution to the proliferation of passwords and damned as a frivolous invasion of your body. Made by Proteus Digital Health of Redwood City, CA, the digestible chip might find application in prisons and nursing homes, but it is hard to imagine a free citizen wanting to pop one of these with their daily vitamins. Aside from the unsavory feeling of having a foreign object broadcasting from inside your tummy, this concept might reduce stealing your access credentials to the simple act of grabbing one of your pills.

  Matthew Drake of the Atlanta-based advertising agency 22squared thinks he has an even better idea. Speaking at TechCrunch SF 2013, he started his demo with “I’ve got a real problem. I love spending money but I hate wearing pants. More specifically I hate carrying around a phone and a wallet.”153

  Drake went on to demonstrate how he thinks we will be paying for purchases in the future. He predicts stores will install inexpensive Leap Motion controllers which will allow you to pay for purchases by waving, reaching, and grabbing imaginary objects in the air. He suggests each of us will come up with a “secret handshake” which will then serve as our password.

  I predict that far too many people will choose gestures that involve the middle finger and will be using it in anger when the system does not quite recognize their finger dance. And they just might get into trouble if they use that finger sequence in public.

  A sophisticated tracking system under development at the University of Nevada uses the Microsoft Kinect consumer product and “turns the user’s hands into versatile sensing rods.”154 GIST (Gestural Interface for Remote Spatial Perception) can already sense colors and the proximity of human beings. In a video demonstration, GIST helps a blind person find her water bottle by giving her voice commands. Pointing at something will tell you how far away it is. However, the designers may want to reconsider their repertoire of gestures. As currently implemented, you locate another person by shaking your fist where you think they might be.

  Parents of teenage gamers are often both bemused and concerned when see their children twitching around like demented robots, utterly lost in some violent alternative universe. The effect will be even more striking as we move to a world of eye-tracking glasses, Leap Motion controllers, and even heartbeat-controlled music-making.155 The acquisition of virtual reality goggle–maker Oculus VR by Facebook for $2 billion confirms that major companies are betting on the future of combining data from both real and virtual worlds.156

  As every place from airports to shopping malls to historic buildings starts using augmented reality technologies, we may face a new digital divide that will put non-users at a disadvantage. People without the right high tech eyewear may not receive important information. They might head to the wrong airport gate, miss a sudden flash sale at a store, or fail to appreciate the subtle architectural details of a building.

  All the sophisticated display systems in the world would be useless without a solid stream of data to feed them. Data is being gathered at unprecedented rates, from all over the planet, as well as from space and with manned and unmanned aircraft, better known as drones. These will start to proliferate over domestic airspace as the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issues new rules for their use. In Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control, Medea Benjamin notes that the infrared camera on a Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) “can even identify the heat signature of a human body from 10,000 feet in the air.”157 You can pretty well assume that if someone has one of these aircraft in your vicinity and wants to find you, they can do it.

  Unless you live in a war zone, or near a border that is patrolled by air, you might assume that nobody is flying infrared sensors over your house. However, as thermal imaging technology becomes cheaper and more widely available, all sorts of projects are becoming possible. For example, the Slough Borough Council in the U.K. flew a thermal imaging camera over their Berkshire town and discovered 6,350 suspicious buildings that might be “sheds with beds”—possible illegal rental conversions.

  A Calgary, Alberta-based energy project called HEAT (Heat Energy Assessment Technologies) has been flying a thermal infrared camera over homes in the area and posting the results online at www.saveheat.co. Anyone can look up their address, or anyone else’s home, to see how they stack up in terms of wasting heat.158 This information is provided openly on a website without any form of registration being required.

  Data like this is a gold mine for contractors looking to get energy-saving business, for police looking for marijuana “grow ops,” and for nosey neighbors. The project’s organizer
assures the public that “it is not our role” to report suspicious activity and that, upon request, you can have your home removed from the database. He also says that no one has ever requested to have their home removed, which would cause it to display as a blank space with the notation “PRIVACY CONCERNS.”159 Doing that would undoubtedly raise a red flag that something nefarious is going on in your home—what do you have to hide?

  Even if the government is not trying to nab you for growing pot, you might face the wrath of civic and environmental organizations, or even citizen vigilantes looking to find “energy wasters” and shame them publicly.

  While there is no reason to doubt the noble intentions of this project there is really nothing to prevent overzealous law enforcement from using the data collected in this manner. In a 2001 case, the United States Supreme Court ruled that using Thermovision imaging to detect the heat emitted by indoor farming was unconstitutional. However, it was a close (5-4) decision that could have gone either way. In his dissent, Justice Paul Stevens wrote that “Heat waves, like aromas that are generated in a kitchen, or in a laboratory or opium den, enter the public domain if and when they leave a building.”160

  An even more ominous aspect of the Supreme Court’s decision in this case is that the unreasonableness of the search hinges on the use of “a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion.” However, how long will it be before our smartphones have thermal imaging and other intrusive capabilities?