1984 is a well-known dystopian novel published by George Orwell in 1949. In the book Orwell is predicting the future about where society might be in the future. One of the aspects that Orwell goes over in the book is the constant surveillance that is going in. The people in the world of 1984, have no real privacy. Many of them live in apartments equipped with two-way telescreens so that they may be watched or listened to at any time. Similar telescreens are found at workstations and in public places, along with hidden microphones. This all seems very intrusive and in today’s world quite unlikely to happen. However, this situation might be closer than you think.
Where in the novel by George Orwell the people are obliged to have this surveillance equipment in their houses, people nowadays are buying them voluntarily. Smartphones are integrated into society nowadays. They make lives easier and offer lots of value to people. These smartphones can however record everything around it. Possible insightful information for people with bad intentions. Today we are living in a world with 10 billion sensors in it. A lot of these sensors can be used to record what is happening around them. And it’s nothing compared to where we are headed. He posits that according to Moore’s Law (the rule that computer power will double at the same price every 18 months), in 2020 we’ll be living in a world flooded with more than 1 trillion sensors (a projection which aligns with estimates from HP, IBM and Bosch). This information can be used by, for example, secret services. We need to hope that they will have ‘good’ intentions with all this recordings (solving crimes, tracking terrorists etc.). However all this information can also be used for negative purposes. One example of this is blackmailing. You’ll see articles online warning you of people hacking laptops or tablets and turning on the webcam without you noticing it so they can watch you (think about how many taped off webcams on laptops you’ll see if you look around). This gives an unsettling and sick feeling as this is a huge intrusion on your privacy.
Recently Artem Russakovskii of Android Police discovered that his recently purchased Google Home Mini (a home assistant, similar to the Amazon Echo) was recording everything he said 24/7 and was sending this data to Google. All this happened to a bug and so was never the intention of Google. They fixed the bug quickly and updated all other Home Mini systems. But still the thought of how easy it will be for people, companies or the government to ‘spy’ on us gives an unpleasant feeling.
It should be noted that all these technologies can be extremely useful in daily life. However we should always keep thinking about the consequences of surrounding ourselves with all this new tech. We should always keep in mind the path we want society and life to go down. This might mean we need to come up with regulations when new technologies emerge, so we won’t end up in a dystopia like in ‘1984’.
Stadtmiller, M (2017) Why you should always assume you’re being secretly recorded, [Online] Available at https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-you-should-always-assume-youre-being-secretly-recorded [Accessed 20 Oct. 2017].
Russakovskii, A (2017) Google is permanently nerfing all Home Minis because mine spied on everything I said 24/7, [Online] Available at http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/10/10/google-nerfing-home-minis-mine-spied-everything-said-
247/[Accessed 20 Oct. 2017].
Hi Jan,
Thanks for your interesting post!
The other day I had a discussion with my friends about this. My first reaction was that the legislation should and must change in order to control this sensitive data. Meaning, privacy related data of individuals and organizations and the security of this data should be regulated by law and governments. Right now, reading your article, I realize that as learned in the course and according to the article of Hashem et al. (2015) the four V’s of data, namely velocity, volume, variety and value, as a result of the digital ubiquity causes extreme use, diffusion and even misuse of (structured, semi-structured, and structured) data.
Knowing this, I think on a business level, the big companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, eBay with loads of available big data should and could be restrained by new legislation and control of government. For the coming years this will be hard because these giants are so powerful (and smart) that the laws will not be sufficient restricting because of the complexity of data and data use. The new knowledge areas take some time to be fully understood. The big data development is developing faster than legislation can keep up with. So, on a personal level: what to do with all the dispersed and diffused small pieces of data which can be very powerful when combined together? I think control and prevention of misuse of this data is even harder to establish. I place my hopes on a shift in mindset as the Internet matures. Right now, (especially young) people are comfortable with sharing information. But this is likely to change when more is known about the risks of online behavior. In a even more ideal situation, this mind shift will open an innovative market for online privacy and security tools.
In addition, I read an interview of Franklin Foer (one of the brothers of Foer) in Sir Edmund (a newspaper attachment of De Volkskrant) about his book release. It is called “World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech”. A tip if you are interested a more brad view of how our world is changing with the existence of big tech companies. He elaborates more on how we become Internet dependent and how it even can change the democracy.
Hashem, I. A. T., Yaqoob, I., Anuar, N. B., Mokhtar, S., Gani, A., Khan, S. U. (2015). The rise of “big data” on cloud computing: Review and open research issues. Information Systems, 47, 98-115.
Hi Jan,
Thanks for writing such an interesting article. It seems crazy to think that in modern society, there could be people following our every action, intentionally or otherwise. While this has of course been possible online for a while now, it is interesting to see this become a part of our daily lives offline as well. However, I wonder if the future will prove to become what you have written about. Although I am sure the surveillance and intrusive monitoring is usually not meant to be used for bad purposes, but there are undeniably people in the world that would be willing to take advantage of such technological advances in a manner that is detrimental to society. My main question to you is whether or not you think there is an upper limit to the extent of this situation. To further clarify my question, you mention Moore’s Law, which essentially posits that sensors will continue to spread exponentially. In a blog post I posted today called ‘Are we over exaggerating AI?’ (see the link below), I wrote about an article in which the author explains that Moore’s Law is not applicable to advanced technology/artificial intelligence and that major developments with microchip performance will not exponentially increase forever. What are your thought on this? I look forward to hearing from you!
Here’s the link to my article; it might change your mind about the extent a ‘big brother’ dystopia is possible!
https://digitalstrategy.rsm.nl//2017/10/22/are-we-over-exaggerating-ai/