Little Brothers are Watching You
Fri, 07/01/2005 - 07:59
The Business
"Embedded systems will be everywhere", says Ken Sakamura, a University of Tokyo professor in the keynote at the Embedded Systems Expo as reported in an article by EE Times. Is this still news to anyone?
The question is not whether this is going to happen. It already is happening. The question is who is going to control the information. The endgame of this scenario can be anything from a massively cooperative network that enables all of us to be all that we can be to governmental monitoring and oppression that make Orwell's 1984 look tame in comparison. The difficult part is that the same scenario can look like both of these situations, depending on which side of the monitors you are sitting.
Consider traffic cameras, for example. Right now they are most evident when they are catching people running red lights or misusing commuter lanes. This is an intrusion into privacy, but it is only the bad people that are being intruded upon, so that is OK. Most modern highways include traffic monitors that track vehicle speed. These can be combined with cameras to catch speeders automatically. Again, it's only the bad people, but my Corvette has put me on the other side of that line once or twice.
For that matter, my Corvette not only allows me to break the law by speeding but it could rat me out as well. Black box monitors in cars are old news, and insurance companies are pushing to get more access to the information contained in them.
All of this information is not good or evil. It just is. The question is what can be done with the information and who has control of it. This is an area where society had better catch up with technology in a hurry.
Larry Mittag
The question is not whether this is going to happen. It already is happening. The question is who is going to control the information. The endgame of this scenario can be anything from a massively cooperative network that enables all of us to be all that we can be to governmental monitoring and oppression that make Orwell's 1984 look tame in comparison. The difficult part is that the same scenario can look like both of these situations, depending on which side of the monitors you are sitting.
Consider traffic cameras, for example. Right now they are most evident when they are catching people running red lights or misusing commuter lanes. This is an intrusion into privacy, but it is only the bad people that are being intruded upon, so that is OK. Most modern highways include traffic monitors that track vehicle speed. These can be combined with cameras to catch speeders automatically. Again, it's only the bad people, but my Corvette has put me on the other side of that line once or twice.
For that matter, my Corvette not only allows me to break the law by speeding but it could rat me out as well. Black box monitors in cars are old news, and insurance companies are pushing to get more access to the information contained in them.
All of this information is not good or evil. It just is. The question is what can be done with the information and who has control of it. This is an area where society had better catch up with technology in a hurry.
Larry Mittag
