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It is apparent that our actions (including our searches and surfing on the internet, our frequent GPS-trackable trips, our supermarket purchasing patterns, our medical treatments and prescription pick-ups, or credit purchases, our loan and utilities consumption and payments and countless other "data points", which if properly connected over a period of time could provide a powerful personal, emotional, physical and psychographic profile of every single one of us) while doing the ordinary dance of of our lives on the proverbial grid are being carefully surveilled and accumulated -- ostensibly for providing us with a "more personalized customer experience," or for making it easier to categorize us into the most likely purchasers of goods or services, or for [frighteningly] manipulating us through the manipulation of our environment at the most intimate levels.
Yes -- this is surveillance, a systematic intrusion of privacy, the accumulation of a "dossier" on each of us for use by anyone willing to pay for it. So long as we interface and engage with electronic commerce, we can count on being placed on lists, categorized, 'selected' for various 'responsibilities,' photographed, metered and observed. We have no privacy while we live in this civilization.
Various computer hacking attacks, bulk thefts of data, internet and social media harassment and worse are on the rise and cannot be abated as technology is further interwoven into the very fabric of the grid.
We either need camouflage, or tools for randomizing the data collected about us to render it unclear, if not totally useless. I call this defense strategy "Randomization," and it entails obscuring real patterns by a constant intrusion of "wild card" variables which conflict with what we are actually doing or wher we are really going; what we like and what we do not like; what are weaknesses are and what our strengths are.
I view this deliberate smokescreen as a necessary pre-emptive defense. A way to befoul (and render unreliable) dangerous statistical and probablistic patterns, confound data miners, paralyze blackmailers (or whatever Politically Correct euphemisms they may choose to call themselves by) and give us simple civilians living on the grid and engaging in peaceful, harmless activities a chance to be free of intrusion and harrassment.
Randomization produces obscurity.
Obscurity produces camouflage.
And camouflage is the next best thing to privacy.
Given more and more abuses of our privacy and privilege, and more intrusions interfering with our right to true life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness you could be looking at technologies developed to provide us with identity randomization.
And yes, I believe that identity randomization is going to be very much in demand -- just as I believe some very technologically sophisticated, intelligence-trained, evasive maneuver tacticians are going to get together with some very intelligent defectors from the other side, and develop these technologies for consumers and businesses to use as a veil of protection. Privacy and anonymity in certain circumstances (most of them quite simple and legal) are becoming increasingly valuable, and some futuristic entrepreneurs will develop the tools to enable us ordinary pedestrians to hide in plain sight. I sense a new era and some interesting investment opportunities in a growth industry, as well.
Maybe we can stay one step of The Adjustment Bureau. This could be wonderful for a restoration of purloined freedoms, and a boon to clever entrepreneurial leaders who believe that our individuality is sacred, and that a desire for privacy doesn't mean we have something to hide -- but simply that we don't need voyeurs peeking in through our glass walled dwellings.
Douglas E. Castle for The Global Futurist Blog.
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