Odds are you will be monitored today — many times over.
Surveillance cameras at airports, subways, banks and other public venues are not the only devices tracking you. Inexpensive, ever-watchful digital sensors are now ubiquitous.
They are in laptop webcams, video-game motion sensors, smartphone cameras, utility meters, passports and employee ID cards. Step out your front door and you could be captured in a high-resolution photograph taken from the air or street by Google or Microsoft, as they update their respective mapping services. Drive down a city thoroughfare, cross a toll bridge, or park at certain shopping malls and your license plate will be recorded and time-stamped.
Several developments have converged to push the monitoring of human activity far beyond what George Orwell imagined. Low-cost digital cameras, motion sensors and biometric readers are proliferating just as the cost of storing digital data is decreasing. The result: the explosion of sensor data collection and storage.
Over the next couple of years, the volume of data generated by digital sensors will surpass the flow of e-mails and social-network entries combined, predicts Stephen Brobst, chief technical officer at data analytics firm Teradata. “Sensors will touch nearly every aspect of our lives,” he says.
Meanwhile, technology is rapidly being developed to efficiently mine this mushrooming trove of sensor data in novel ways. Affectiva, a Waltham, Mass., start-up, for instance, recently introduced biometric wristbands capable of monitoring tiny changes in sweat-gland activity to gauge emotional reactions. Therapists are using the wristbands with autistic children to better understand emotional outbreaks. Marketing consultants use the bands to pinpoint what pleases or frustrates shoppers.
At the recent International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Intel and Microsoft introduced a prototype of an in-store digital billboard that can memorize your face. The technology soon could be used in billboards capable of keeping track of the…