Surveillance Devices to Eventually Record Entire Lives
True Big Brother 24/7, 365 surveillance is not here just yet, but if Martin Sadler, a senior scientist at Hewlett Packard is to be believed, it's not too far off. By 2057, he says there will be roughly one million sensors and recorders for every U.K. resident. Sadler has warned that the amount of information being collected from such a network of devices will lead to important ethical dilemmas.Though New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg recently suggested a video surveillance program for downtown Manhattan, public surveillance is much more prevalent in the U.K. than it is here in the states. Its effectiveness as an anti-terror tool was most famously demonstrated in 2005 in the wake of the London bus bombings when video of the suspects was immediately made available to the media.
Today, the average Londoner is captured on surveillance at least 300 times a day, a number that's on the rise. Many uses of the technology are "innocent and harmless," but the shear wealth of information being collected may lead to dangers that we're only now beginning to understand. Sadler's eerie vision of the future isn't limited to one in which advertisements are targeted at people based on where they were earlier in the day -- though, that will certainly happen. He envisions a future in which there are sensors so small, they'll be able to permeate our bodies to collect personal data.
Sadler says, "We have some real choices that we can make over the next few years about how much we benefit from all this information ... or how much it presents some sort of dark future for us." As we recently reported, the South Koreans are currently conducting a similar self-audit to determine the future dangers of developing technology, only the Koreans are focused on robots instead of surveillance.
From The BBC
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