Convergence- Today's Demon
“Inventions reached their limit long ago and I
see no hope for further development”
What an exquisite under-statement. I can see it
now, at the door of the patents office, on a bronze plaque, placed in memory of
the originator, Julius Frontinus, somewhere around 40 BC. Julius was a noted
Roman engineer and inventor. I wonder where he would stand today is confronted
by today's "inventions".
Technology today is not so much about
"inventions" but rather it's about technology and how that technology
can be applied in such a way as to be useful to the user at the front end and
under normal circumstances it will provide service to a user at the back end as
well. For example having access to e-mail as a front end user gives us a method
of communicating with our friends, colleagues etc; but at the back-end when we
use that e-mail address for example when we fill out a form online we are
providing a second tier of usability to those who want as many e-mail addresses
as they can get their hands on for marketing purposes, et cetera.
Over the last couple of weeks we've been
looking at the Finkelstein report on media convergence and it occurred to me
that convergence has gone much further than just media, and in our day-to-day
use of information technology, convergence is actually more common than perhaps
we like to think about. For example, if I have a Facebook account I can link it
to my Gmail account which can then be linked to my LinkedIn account so that we
see a convergence of elements all of which are part of our online identity,
perhaps we might be better calling it our "online persona".
The thing we forget when we utilise Gmail as
our primary means of communication, and this is not something restricted to
Gmail, it's true of any e-mail process, is that in providing us, as consumers,
with a method of communication we are also providing marketers with a platform
for their product/service and in one way or another, they are happy to pay for
that platform.
We at the Council have a fairly marked opinion
of the utilisation of personal information by government but that is really
only a fairly small part of the overall process. We must also take into account
the use made of our online persona by those who call upon Google to accurately
deliver marketing information to us.
I have in the past, when addressing a
University information technology course used the example of the young Bolivian
man who was shot by London police on suspicion of terrorism, but which in
effect was incompetent use of technology. Interestingly the technology which
was incompetently used by the London police to take that 21-year-old life is
exactly the same technology that we see used today by Facebook in their process
of "tagging" photographs from all over the world, from all of its
users. Essentially, that technology allows Facebook to scan every photograph in
its database, and there are terabytes of it, and literally tag every face in
every photograph so long as one face has been tagged somewhere. My friends know
me well enough not to tag photographs of me and in fact I have gone out of my
way to ensure that no photographs of me exist on the Internet, which is my way
of saying "catch me if you can".
I guess primarily my view of information technology
and its misuse not just by government but also by big business is that the
capacity to big business to say "it's all too hard", and leave it as
it stands now puts us in a disadvantaged situation in terms of managing our
online identity, not just the persona that we present, which may have a
somewhat different name to our own but a montage of elements which if put together
leaves us in a situation where our online persona suddenly becomes mixed up
with our actual persona and all the problems inherent in that mixing of
identities.
We have a right as world citizens to privacy.
There is no automatic right to utilise our persona, or our person by big
business or for that matter by government. They have a right to contact this by
whatever means they feel is appropriate but the right and ability to contact
does not in and of itself engender an immediate right to push products down our
throat which we have no use for, which we have no interest in and which we
would never buy as a result of walking into a shop specifically looking for.
Our problem as I see it, is that we shrug our shoulders and accept the tons of
spam that comes into our e-mail boxes offering us bigger appendages or sharing
$27 million from Nigeria but we rarely go round and follow-up on those people
who are sending those millions of spam e-mails which account for something like
80% of Internet traffic on a day-to-day basis. Perhaps it's time we took enough
interest in managing and maintaining the security of our online persona, to
actually follow up and find out a little bit about those people who have taken
the time and put in the effort to invade our privacy
Our seminar, who watches Google while Google
watches you, attracted the interest of about 30 people. Our seminar on
injecting drugs attracted over 130. What in reality, do these two figures say
about us as technology consumers and as people who simply by their interest in
the Council, one would have thought, would take more interest in these issues.
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