Such technology has enormous potential to improve health
and save lives. The amount of data the technology gathers,
however, can be extraordinary and very intimate. Some people
worry that the technology might be abused. For instance, what
if a business knew more about your health than you did and
used this information to deny you a job or health insurance or
to try to sell you pharmaceutical products? These questions are
unresolved and will undoubtedly surface as technology develops.
“It detects your posture, so you know when
you need to reposition yourself. [It measures]
blood and tissue oxygen, your red blood cell
count, and things like step count. As you
know, doctors recommend about 10,000
steps a day, and this will show you how close
you’re getting.”
—Dave Eggers,
The Circle
, futuristic novel, description
of a medical sensor in someone’s body, 2013
WhiCh Future Do We WAnt?
The rapid concentration of power and data into the hands of
governments and tech companies could end privacy as we
have historically understood it. Imagine this future scenario: We
live in a world in which every square foot is under some kind
of camera surveillance. The images taken by these cameras
are scanned with facial recognition software to identify the
people in the pictures, as well as their locations and activities.
That data is combined with data from each individual’s
computers, smartphones, and other devices. Each person’s
data is aggregated, analyzed, and compared to billions of other
78 Information Insecurity
