Create an air of Information Misuse.
- Increasing misuse of information may lead to the increased need of privacy measures. For this hackers will have to create a scenario where examples of information misuse are more than serious crimes that the measures of everyware offer. Various measures may then be made to protect information and further misuse.
Creating natural faraday shields.
- How about wearing temporary braces on your teeth of body that can shield you from being read?
Creating a Magnetic Riot
- Everyone purchases large magnets and jams all the readers and tags causing huge losses to the systems and companies. Magnets may henceforth become illegal in shops for personal use. But then most other devices use some form of magnetic energy, and rebels will always find a way to manufacture sufficient energy holes to warp all electronics for miles.
Clones to Clown
- One could have multiple identities through clones, each with an aspect of the clone-maker. This way, one part of you could gain some privacy while another is out there in the public. This is possible under the circumstance that the world population drastically reduces and laws begin to permit clones to work. It is possible that highly industrialized nations may opt for cloning first because of the fact that they are experiencing a reduced workforce, and are constantly having to outsource their workload.
With people becoming more open to having public profiles on the web through social networking websites, we will see how people are beginning to be more comfortable with public images. Reality television shows, people willingly documenting their personal lives on blogs have affected the way people understand privacy.
Even though voyeurism is on the rise, we need to understand that social networking has gotten people together and created a state of well-being amongst those who are connected, even if it may mean that people and their relationships are often trackable.
Privately public means that even though you may be living your life privately, the way you want to, your information is publicized, like the case of a celebrity, about whom, every private information is publicized. But in the days of everyware, the issue rises in the fact that we are not strongly aware of the publicized information, because of the simple tacitity that communication between everyware objects will have, and are thus more vulnerable to perversion of technology. The lack of awareness is the road to the privately public future.
A general norm is to not stare at couples holding hands in public. This gives them privacy even in a public space. Publicly private means having a sense of privacy even in a public space. It is possible that in the days of everyware, we can still have our privacy because of the overload of information and its acceptance as the norm. And the fact that all our lives are connected to a database of retrievable memories need not pervade our private lives. Of course this remains as long as we forget who has access to our private information and who can misuse it to cause damage or manipulate us.
Once we have understood how RFID technology along with a host of other technologies can be used to make our world ubiquitously smarter, our whole perspective of the way we communicate changes. Your toothpaste would inform the supermarket that its getting over and apply for a new toothpaste. You could have a book that knows the last line you read, and immediately open to the page where you left. Your car would self start as soon as it sees you approaching. The future is not a science fiction dream, all these and much more is possible with technologies like RFID. The question is at what cost are we arriving at this kind of future. Yes, you will be leaving an information trail wherever you go. And you maybe tracked, followed, and observed for a reason or for no reason. This is a technology that in the background, within inventories, can create many cost saving benefits and increase efficiency. Or in special contexts, for instance, as payment at expensive beach clubs, or in the case of a threat to a particular individual, where tracking may have valid reasons.
The issue is about what happens when this technology comes to the foreground. Advertisers can use tags to screen personal and convincing advertorials at the naive consumer. Governments may want to issue cards to all its citizens, in the name of it being a welfare state concerned about giving its citizens privileges, a better quality of life, and better security.
What happens now, definitely is worth imagining. With increasing access to your information, with no past, present or future as life transits into a data collection process, the average person will begin to become a puppet in the hands of the information system. Many activists have been raising issues about protecting privacy, and why it is important for maintaining human freedom of speech and liberty. In reply to angry activism about privacy, Scott McNealy of Sun microsystems said “You have no privacy anyway, get over it”. Could we survive in a transparent world. Would people accept living a transparent life? Will governments and markets comply with this sort of transparency, or will they use it as a gimmick? Take the example of Hasan Elahi, (http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-06/ps_transparency ) a professor who in retaliation to being detained and searched at an airport, has begun documenting his life, by listing his geographic position, and images on his web-site. What if everyone agreed to live life publicly?
The RFID revolution is bound to change our way of life. What we need to discuss is how we can continue to preserve our individual privacy, or should we preserve it at all.
