Technocreep

by Thomas P. Keenan

  There is a lot to be learned from Disney’s bold, profitable foray into tagging people like farmers tag their cows. The first is how a technology can become “de facto mandatory.” Sure, it’s possible to live in Los Angeles without a car or in Beijing without a mobile phone: it’s just not much fun. It’s the same with MagicBands. Just wait till your kids look up and ask “Daddy, why are we standing in line while those people don’t have to?”

  A second take-away lesson comes from the “long-range” nature of the wireless technology associated with MagicBands. With a good enough network and smart enough tracking software, park vendors, characters, hackers, and identity thieves will literally be able to “see you coming.”

  Did you buy a vegetarian lunch? Shake Minnie’s hand but not Mickey’s? Perhaps you visited the washroom every half hour? Sporting the Disney version of a prisoner’s ankle bracelet, you’re sending a constant flow of information to a system that’s trying to decide what to sell you next.

  Disney Chairman Thomas O. Staggs insists that all the features of the wristband can be turned off. If you don’t want Cinderella to call your little princess by name, well that’s your problem. Of course, you cannot opt out of the core tracking functionality of the devices used by Disney for market research.

  Disney’s creepy MagicBands serve as the proving ground for the “please track me” world that marketers dream about every night, as well as a laboratory for a grand experiment. Just how much privacy will you surrender for a service or status that you feel is valuable?

  Of course, the minute you leave the park, you can toss that MagicBand in the trash. Or you can keep it and try to figure out how it works and how it can be tricked. I suspect several dozen people who attend DEF CON every year are working on hacking these things right now.

  While Disney’s implementation seems especially problematic because it is completely controlled by them and fits on wrists that are three inches in diameter, it does not take a lot of imagination to see how this concept could easily extend into the wider world.

  Most people are already carrying a generic version of the MagicBand called a smartphone. Indeed, a suite of apps with names like Family GPS Tracker allow you to follow your loved ones, or anyone who gives permission, and track them on a map.

  Smartphone tracking permission can sometimes be granted surreptitiously. There are many ways to put malware on phones, the latest being via “Black Widow” phone chargers that not only charge your phone, but also install rogue software to track you, read all your messages, perhaps even plan a good time to rob your house.

  Indeed some educational sites like pleaserobme.com have been created to dramatize the risks of putting things online like “Whee … we’re all on the way to Hawaii. Dog’s at the dog sitter’s. Neighbor’s picking up the mail. Back in two weeks. Aloha!!!”

  It’s a good thing that dog’s safely at the dog sitter’s, because pets that are home alone do indeed get stolen, or at least hassled by the police.

  Pet Creep

  I tell this tale with a bit of trepidation because it was imparted to me by a gun-toting officer of the law in a place of liquid refreshment. However, I have every reason to believe it is 100% true and it illustrates an important point of technocreepiness: Give somebody physical access to your technology, even briefly, and they can effectively “own” you. I also know that the person who told me this story would never be allowed to put it in writing, so here goes.

  My Federal law enforcement buddies needed to do a “black bag job” on a certain organized crime figure’s house. This involved entering the premises to install a piece of spyware on the suspect’s ­computer. So they sent him a nice letter from a local restaurant inviting the whole family to a complimentary meal, reservations required, of course.

  On the night of this expedition, once the family was gone, my Fed friends opened the front door and were confronted with the family pets. A dog and a cat.

  The dog was no problem, or at least “nothing that a nice juicy steak wouldn’t take care of.” They had come prepared with fresh meat. The family cat, on the other hand, dashed out the front door. Several burly Federal agents were now dispatched to hunt down the animal, staying in touch by secure radio. After a while, they reported back: “We have the suspect in custody.” The keystroke recorder was safely installed, and the cat was returned. They locked the door the same way they got in. They did notice a large amount of yowling and barking as they departed, but thought nothing of it.

  “The f****** feds broke into my house and switched my cat!” the man told his criminal buddies the next day. A case of mistaken feline identity, but at least the keystroke recorder did its job.

  I was once hired by the CEO of a company to do a similar covert intervention on a corrupt employee’s computer in the middle of the night. I discovered that the office building’s lights were programmed to go off at 6 PM. I knew it would arouse suspicion if I turned them on and that fact showed up in a log. I too had come prepared, so I had a romantic candlelit session installing the evidence-gathering device. The employee resigned the following week.300

  Today, of course, penetrations like these would be done remotely and the guy would probably have video surveillance all over his house. He would certainly be keeping tabs on his pets and possessions with a few cameras.

  These days, the business of pets is booming, especially with respect to technology. There are people using technology to relate to their pets in ways that are usually reserved for kids of the non-fur-bearing variety. And, it’s getting creepier by the day.

  The motto of Biscuits and Baths, at 87th Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan, is “The most fun your dog can have without you.” They offer an extensive program, including: “Frolic in Central Park. Eat an all-organic lunch. Take an afternoon nap. Urinate on a tree.” Even at a high end doggie day care like Biscuits and Baths, owners still fret about their pets during the day. That’s why some pet facilities are sprouting the same video technology you can use to spy on your human kids in their day care.

  And if you do leave your precious pet home alone, technology also offers solutions such as the Petcube. Its creator, Alex Neskin, wanted to amuse his pet Chihuahua Rocky who was left home alone. Since Rocky’s favorite activity is chasing a laser pointer, Neskin taped one to a web camera that he could control remotely. He also allowed friends access to the website so that they too could play with Rocky.

  There is also a simpler solution called Pintofeed. It allows you to remotely dispense food for your pets, but there’s no loudspeaker to let your pet know when dinner is served. Once we accept that pets are indeed child surrogates for many people, these technological accommodations don’t seem that weird. But then we move into new territory, like animal selfies.

  Cats now have their own photo sharing app, Snapcat. It was reportedly cobbled together in 24 hours at a Berlin hackathon. and allows cats to take a self-portrait by swiping their paw across a smartphone. Clearly some people take their pets as seriously as they do children.

  The real creepiness here is that we have distanced ourselves so much from our pets, both physically and psychologically, that we feel we need to make it up to them with technologies like Petcube, Pintofeed, and Snapcat. Some people are so concerned about the welfare of their pets that they even write them into their will.

  Real estate tycoon Leona Helmsley left a $12 million trust fund to her female Maltese dog, Trouble, while cutting two grandchildren out of her will completely.301 A judge reduced the pooch’s purse to a mere $2 million. That probably would have covered many years in a nice suite with room service and twice-a-day walks by the hotel’s concierge. However, Trouble only outlived his doting owner by three years.302

  You don’t have to be a billionaire to make thoughtful provisions for your pet. Animals can inherit wealth in most U.S. states, which have guidelines for a formal “pet trust.” Other countries, like Canada, don’t allow leaving money directly to dogs, cats, birds, or squirrels, but your fur kids can be provi
ded for within regular trust structures.303

  One Canadian “make your own will” site, www.formalwill.ca, has a downloadable form for a “Pet Guardian Agreement,” providing directions for feeding, hiring groomers, walkers, and even instructions for when heroic medical treatments are to be given.304 The pet form costs the same ($59 CAD) as the one that covers your human offspring. Perhaps the reason this is offered as an online service is that most of us would feel like an idiot discussing cat food brands in front of a lawyer who was billing us $350 an hour.

  A study by scientists at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna reported striking similarities between owner-dog and parent-child relationships. Researcher Lisa Horn wrote that the “unique relationship between adult dogs and their human owners bears a remarkable resemblance to an infant attachment bond: dogs are dependent on human care and their behavior seems specifically geared to engage their owners’ care-giving system.”305 So dogs, at least, are genetically engineered to suck up to us to make sure they get fed, walked, and, sometimes, remembered in the will.

  Our fixation with pets, often elevating them to the status of family members and surrogate children, is source of some amusement in other countries where the concept of a yearly vet checkup or gourmet dog food is seen as risible.

  An ad campaign that ran in New York subway cars in 2012 purported to offer pet makeovers, parodying the style of a well-known local plastic surgeon. The ad turned out to be a clever tongue-in-cheek promotion for Nick Kroll’s sketch comedy show on Comedy Central, but there actually is a thriving business in cosmetic surgery for dogs, and not just for facelifts to correct drooping eyelids. The other end of the pooch also gets attention.

  A Kansas City, Missouri, company called CTI Corporation has spared over half a million male dogs, cats, bulls, monkeys, horses, water buffalos, rats, and yes, prairie dogs, from embarrassment at the off-leash park or paddock. The company sells silicon testicular implants called Neuticles®, which are used to fill empty scrotums after an animal has been “fixed.”

  In his book Going … Going … Nuts: The Story Has To Be Told, inventor Gregg Miller says he owes the multi-million dollar idea to his beloved bloodhound Buck:

  Buck looked up at me with a puzzled expression—his Bloodhound look of worry and concern. He looked back down again—and then back at me a second time with an expression of “where did they go—what has happened to me?” He didn’t clean himself—only had that look of bewilderment. Buck knew they were gone and for over a week seemed sluggish and depressed.”306

  Working with a vet to solve Buck’s problem, Miller’s work not only earned him U.S. patent #5,868,140 and a thriving business. He was also the 2005 winner of the tongue-in-cheek IG Nobel Prize in medicine, a fact he proudly trumpets on his webpage.307

  Miller’s company also does a lot of really good things, like making ear and eye prostheses for injured animals. Neuticles® Original are very reasonable: the medium size for dogs 30-60 pounds are only $84 each, though you’ll probably want to get the pair for $139. You might also throw in a tank top sporting the company’s slogan, “It’s Like Nothing Ever Changed.” Though you can order Neuticles® on the Internet, they’re not approved for human use, especially not the horse, bull, or water buffalo sizes.

  Why do Neuticles® seem like a creepy use of technology? Surely not because, as some might suggest, it’s a waste of medical resources that could have been given to humans. After all this is a procedure, paid for by the pet owner, done by a veterinarian, and taking an extra three to five minutes when they’re working in there anyway. It’s more about how we view the minds of our domestic animals.

  The idea that our pets have fragile psyches that need nurturing does go a long way to imputing human emotions to non-human creatures. While cats purr and dog wag their tails, and this certainly seems correlated with happiness, it is quite a leap to assume that they’ve having the same kind of thoughts as we do. Then again, soon we might be able to ask them what’s on their minds.

  On April 1, 2012, Google Announced “Google Voice for Pets” which would allow you to receive text messages and even voicemails from your dog and cat. The key innovation was “Voice Communication Collars” These Google-invented devices “fit around your pet’s neck and use a series of sensors to record audio directly from your dog or cat’s vocal cords, using technology originally developed for NASA spacesuits.”308 They didn’t stop there, going on to say “voicemails from your pet would be pretty silly if you haven’t been trained how to understand cat or dog. Thankfully, we’ve solved that problem too. We took our voicemail transcription engine and combined it with millions of adorable pet videos from the Internet, training it to understand our furry friends. Now our transcription engine can now translate cat meows or dog growls into English!”

  If you clicked on the link “to be one of the first pet owners to try our special communication collars,” you were taken to a Google search on “April Fool’s Day.” This was one of Google’s little pranks.

  But, not so fast. Perhaps talking to the animals is not so far-fetched. Northern Arizona University Professor Emeritus Constantine Slobodchikoff’s work on communicating with prairie dogs has been featured in The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Smithsonian Magazine.

  In an interview with The Atlantic, Slobodchikoff moved from analyzing the “jump-yip” gesture of the prairie dog to speculating about an electronic device that might open up the hidden world inside the brain of a pet:

  I think we have the technology now to be able to develop the devices that are, say, the size of a cellphone, that would allow us to talk to our dogs and cats. So the dog says “bark!” and the device analyzes it and says, “I want to eat chicken tonight.” Or the cat can say “meow,” and it can say, “You haven’t cleaned my litterbox recently.” He predicts this will be a reality “probably five to ten years out.”309

  We might be skeptical of Slobodchikoff’s vision of human-animal chatter in the coming decade. But he does have an ace up his sleeve. Body language. He figures we have been wasting our time “barking up the wrong tree” in studying animal language by just trying to decode their sounds. Animals communicate with their whole bodies, including their urinary apparatus. They may use signal systems we cannot even detect. Slobodchikoff confirms what every slouching, iPod-wearing teenager is probably told before that first job interview—“when spoken language and body language conflict, the listeners pay attention to the body language.”310

  Of course, it you really want a pet to converse with, you could try a virtual pet like a Furby. The unique feature of the Furby, aside from being cuddly in an alien sort of way, was its language ability. Out of the box, all Furbies spoke their “native language,” Furbish. Given a command, a Furby might say “doo-dah” (meaning “OK, I’ll do that) or “Boo” meaning “no way, José.” Then, according to the hype that had frantic parents tearing them off the shelves around Christmas 1998, your Furby would gradually “learn English,” and shed its Furby baby talk for vaguely proper English. This worried the National Security Agency.

  In 1999 the NSA issued a memo notifying its employees that “personally owned photographic, video, and audio recording equipment are prohibited items. This includes toys, such as ‘Furbys,’ with built-in recorders that repeat the audio with synthesized sound to mimic the original signal.”311

  The fear was that a rogue Furby could record confidential information and then blab it back if its owner stopped off in a bar on the way home with the thing in tow.

  Apparently lacking the will, technical ability, or spare Furbies to cut them apart, the U.S. National Security Agency simply banned them from the premises. At a time when Edward Snowden was still trying to get his first driver’s license, and Wikileaks was only a dream of its “chief visionary” Julian Assange, the NSA was fretting about stuffed toys.312 After all, they were made in China.

  We now know that first generation Furbys were faking it. They only had a two hundred word vocabulary—one hundred in Fur
bish, and one hundred more in English—that they were pre-programmed to reveal. In a blog post, Dwayne Hoover analyzed the inner workings of the original Furby:

  it’s not going to learn or say anything different than the 100 English words it was already programmed to ‘learn.’ You can read it Portuguese porn articles every single day for six months straight, and it’s still going to end up saying, ‘I big worried.’ But, it’s easy to see how the NSA wouldn’t know that. It’s not like they are big on, you know, gathering information about things.313

  We all fell for it, and indeed there were Christmas-time “Furby Fights” at toy stores around the world. Web pages even revealed secret “Furby cheats” like “cover his eyes three times then pat him on the back, and he will crow like a rooster”314

  If one Furby was good, two were even better, since they did have some rudimentary ability to interact. They reportedly played Hide and Seek with each other by saying the phrase “Hey Kitty Kitty Kitty Hide” back and forth.315 Real pets were reportedly driven insane by their incessant chatter.

  This kind of annoying behavior, coupled with the lack of an on/off switch, spawned creative ways to “kill a Furby,” including putting him in a microwave so “the electronic parts of your Furby would be burnt out and destroyed in a very short time.”316 Your microwave would also be destroyed, giving Furby the evil last laugh.

  Hasbro brought Furby back in 2012 to bedevil a new generation. Now with LED eyes, the new Furby comes in a box emblazoned with the ominous tagline “Furby—A Mind of Its Own.” This new Furby interacts with computers and smartphones and can lay eggs which hatch into Furblings.