Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [97]
All of the wonderful things our ubiquitous technology will do for us—and here I'm not being sarcastic; I believe that some significant benefits await our adoption of this technology—will mean little if we don't, as individuals, have genuine power to evaluate its merits on our own terms and make decisions accordingly. We must see that everyware serves us, and when it does not, we must be afforded the ability to shut it down. Even in the unlikely event that every detail of its implementation is handled perfectly and in a manner consistent with our highest ambitions, a paradise without choice is no paradise at all.
Thesis 78
Measures aimed at securing our prerogatives via technical means will also appear.
It's not as if the people now developing ubiquitous systems are blind to the more problematic implications of their work—not all of them, anyway, and not by a long stretch. But perhaps unsurprisingly, when they think of means to address these implications, they tend to consider technical solutions first.
Consider the ethic that your image belongs to you—that in private space, anyway, you have the right to determine who is allowed to record that image and what is done with it. At the seventh annual Ubicomp conference, held in Tokyo in September 2005, a team from the Georgia Institute of Technology demonstrated an ingenious system that would uphold this ethic by defeating unwanted digital photography, whether overt or surreptitious.
By relying on the distinctive optical signature of the charge-coupled devices (CCDs) digital cameras are built around, the Georgia Tech system acquires any camera aimed its way in fractions of a second, and dazzles it with a precisely-calibrated flare of light. Such images as the camera manages to capture are blown out, utterly illegible. As demonstrated in Tokyo, it was both effective and inspiring.
Georgia Tech's demo seemed at first blush to be oriented less toward the individual's right to privacy than toward the needs of institutions attempting to secure themselves against digital observation—whether it might be Honda wanting to make sure that snaps of next year's Civic don't prematurely leak to the enthusiast press, or the Transportation Security Agency trying to thwart the casing of their arrangements at LAX. But it was nevertheless fairly evident that, should the system prove effective under real-world conditions, there was nothing in principle that would keep some equivalent from being deployed on a personal level.
This functions as a timely reminder that there are other ways to protect ourselves and our prerogatives from the less salutary impacts of ubiquitous technology than the guidelines contemplated here. There will always be technical means: various tools, hacks and fixes intended to secure our rights for us, from Dunne & Raby's protective art objects to the (notional) RFIDwasher, a keyfob-sized device that enables its users "to locate RFID tags and destroy them forever!" Some will argue that such material strategies are more efficient, more practical, or more likely to succeed than any assertion of professional ethics.
Thesis 79
Technical measures intended to secure our prerogatives may ignite an arms race or otherwise muddy the issue.
However clever the Georgia Tech system was as a proof of concept—and it made for an impressive demo—there were factors it was not able to account for. For example, it could not prevent photographers using digital SLR cameras (or, indeed, conventional, film-based cameras of any kind) from acquiring images. This was immediately pointed out by optics-savvy members of the audience and openly acknowledged by the designers.
If you were among those in the audience that day in Tokyo, you might have noticed that the discussion took a 90-degree turn at that point. It became one of measures and countermeasures, gambits and responses, ways to game the