Technocreep (13 page)

Matthew Drake of the Atlanta-based advertising agency 22squared thinks he has an even better idea. Speaking at TechCrunch SF 2013, he started his demo with “I've got a real problem. I love spending money but I hate wearing pants. More specifically I hate carrying around a phone and a wallet.”
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Drake went on to demonstrate how he thinks we will be paying for purchases in the future. He predicts stores will install inexpensive Leap Motion controllers which will allow you to pay for purchases by waving, reaching, and grabbing imaginary objects in the air. He suggests each of us will come up with a “secret handshake” which will then serve as our password.

I predict that far too many people will choose gestures that involve the middle finger and will be using it in anger when the system does not quite recognize their finger dance. And they just might get into trouble if they use that finger sequence in public.

A sophisticated tracking system under development at the University of Nevada uses the Microsoft Kinect consumer product and “turns the user's hands into versatile sensing rods.”
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GIST (Gestural Interface for Remote Spatial Perception) can already sense colors and the proximity of human beings. In a video demonstration, GIST helps a blind person find her water bottle by giving her voice commands. Pointing at something will tell you how far away it is. However, the designers may want to reconsider their repertoire of gestures. As currently implemented, you locate another person by shaking your fist where you think they might be.

Parents of teenage gamers are often both bemused and concerned when see their children twitching around like demented robots, utterly lost in some violent alternative universe. The effect will be even more striking as we move to a world of eye-tracking glasses, Leap Motion controllers, and even heartbeat-controlled music-making.
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The acquisition of virtual reality goggle–maker Oculus VR by Facebook for $2 billion confirms that major companies are betting on the future of combining data from both real and virtual worlds.
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As every place from airports to shopping malls to historic buildings starts using augmented reality technologies, we may face a new digital divide that will put non-users at a disadvantage. People without the right high tech eyewear may not receive important information. They might head to the wrong airport gate, miss a sudden flash sale at a store, or fail to appreciate the subtle architectural details of a building.

All the sophisticated display systems in the world would be useless without a solid stream of data to feed them. Data is being gathered at unprecedented rates, from all over the planet, as well as from space and with manned and unmanned aircraft, better known as drones. These will start to proliferate over domestic airspace as the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issues new rules for their use. In
Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control
, Medea Benjamin notes that the infrared camera on a Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) “can even identify the heat signature of a human body from 10,000 feet in the air.”
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You can pretty well assume that if someone has one of these aircraft in your vicinity and wants to find you, they can do it.

Unless you live in a war zone, or near a border that is patrolled by air, you might assume that nobody is flying infrared sensors over your house. However, as thermal imaging technology becomes cheaper and more widely available, all sorts of projects are becoming possible. For example, the Slough Borough Council in the U.K. flew a thermal imaging camera over their Berkshire town and discovered 6,350 suspicious buildings that might be “sheds with beds”—possible illegal rental conversions.

A Calgary, Alberta-based energy project called HEAT (Heat Energy Assessment Technologies) has been flying a thermal infrared camera over homes in the area and posting the results online at
www.saveheat.co
. Anyone can look up their address, or anyone else's home, to see how they stack up in terms of wasting heat.
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This information is provided openly on a website without any form of registration being required.

Data like this is a gold mine for contractors looking to get energy-saving business, for police looking for marijuana “grow ops,” and for nosey neighbors. The project's organizer assures the public that “it is not our role” to report suspicious activity and that, upon request, you can have your home removed from the database. He also says that no one has ever requested to have their home removed, which would cause it to display as a blank space with the notation “PRIVACY CONCERNS.”
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Doing that would undoubtedly raise a red flag that something nefarious is going on in your home—what do you have to hide?

Even if the government is not trying to nab you for growing pot, you might face the wrath of civic and environmental organizations, or even citizen vigilantes looking to find “energy wasters” and shame them publicly.

While there is no reason to doubt the noble intentions of this project there is really nothing to prevent overzealous law enforcement from using the data collected in this manner. In a 2001 case, the United States Supreme Court ruled that using Thermovision imaging to detect the heat emitted by indoor farming was unconstitutional. However, it was a close (5-4) decision that could have gone either way. In his dissent, Justice Paul Stevens wrote that “Heat waves, like aromas that are generated in a kitchen, or in a laboratory or opium den, enter the public domain if and when they leave a building.”
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An even more ominous aspect of the Supreme Court's decision in this case is that the unreasonableness of the search hinges on the use of “a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion.” However, how long will it be before our smartphones have thermal imaging and other intrusive capabilities?

The answer is “quite soon” according to Wilsonville, OR-based FLIR Systems, Inc., which is already taking orders for a sub-$350 add-on that turns an iPhone 5 or 5s into a thermal imaging device. Should this product succeed, peeking at your home with thermal imaging may fall into the “general public use” category.

Most people associate drones with large, military-grade price tags. However, every summer for the past few years at the DEF CON conference, hobbyist drone makers have shown off their latest homemade UAVs with the ability to intercept your cell phone signals and Wi-Fi traffic. Made mostly of Styrofoam, and with password cracking and other penetration capabilities built in, the manufacturing cost of the 2011 version was about $6,200.
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The use of aerial surveillance by law enforcement has seen a “function creep” from being used only in exceptional circumstances to being quite routine. According to a German research paper, police forces often feel justified in using drones in public places like sporting events because the fans have already consented to some degree of surveillance by entering the stadium and passing a warning sign.

However, Peter Ullrich and Gina Rosa Wollinger argue that drones are really closer to covert surveillance than normal security cameras: “Drones are quiet, fly high, and can even be used at night time, if equipped with infra-red or thermal imaging cameras. All these decrease direct visibility and therefore the possibility for the affected persons to realize their being under surveillance, to act accordingly, or just to be able to calculate the consequences of their actions.”
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The average person seeing a small aircraft, manned or unmanned, flying over has no way of knowing what data it is collecting, and who is going to use it for what purpose.

One of the most revelatory tales of retail tracking and data-mining is described by Charles Duhigg in a
New York Times
­article called “How Companies Learn Your Secrets.” He explains that Minneapolis, MN-based Target Corporation created a model to detect, as early as possible, when a customer knew she was pregnant. This would allow the timely marketing of high margin baby-related products. The model was created by a statistician named Andrew Pole.

“About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model,” Duhigg reports, “a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

“‘My daughter got this in the mail!' he said. ‘She's still in high school, and you're sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?
'
”
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It turns out that Target's pregnancy-prediction algorithm had become aware of this young lady's condition, from her purchases, before her father. He called the store manager a few days later with an apology. “It turns out there's been some activities in my house I haven't been completely aware of. She's due in August.”

Duhigg quotes a Target corporate executive as saying “we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn't been spied on, she'll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don't spook her, it works.” So, to avoid the creepy factor, Target started mixing in photos of things like lawn mowers and wine glasses with the baby items in its mailings to mothers-to-be.

It is easy to imagine how this retail-tracking technology might evolve in the near future. Point-of-sale terminals could have cameras and sensors that read a customer's body contours. Pregnancy would be easy to detect in this fashion, along with race, ethnicity, and body mass index. All could be used to target the customer with advertisements and coupons for the next visit.

Peering further into the future, simply touching the keypad of the point-of-sale device might leave behind enough skin cells for a DNA sample to be collected.
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This could lead to genetic profiling, tied to the customer's “Guest ID,” which is already on file. Now the store has a wealth of data, not just on the customer but also on close relatives. Based on what stores like Target are already doing, there is every reason to expect that they would adopt technologies like this, unless they are made explicitly illegal.

Often, we enable tracking of our spending habits in return for discounts or points on loyalty cards. For example, two thirds of Canadian households have an active AIR MILES loyalty account. The points accrued on this can be used for everything from appliances to travel, and you are going to buy groceries or hardware anyway. The parent company of LoyaltyOne, the firm that runs AIR MILES, is Texas-based Alliance Data.
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Once called the AIR MILES folks and asked them how much they know about me if I use their card at Safeway.

“We know you spent $35.62 and got two AIR MILES.”

“So you don't know what I bought?”

“Nope, but if you also use your Safeway loyalty card they know exactly what you purchased right down to the SKU.” In speaking to high school groups, I usually explain this with “they know you bought corn, cantaloupe, and condoms” which seems to make the point.

Some might suggest dumping those cards, but they really have become
de facto
mandatory. Without the Safeway card, and its relatives at drugstores like Shoppers Drug Mart, Boots, Walgreens, CVS, and Duane Reade, you will wind up overpaying for your purchases compared to the person next to you.

Often a kindly cashier will offer a “courtesy discount card or code” to overcome your lack of a card. Since the cards are free, they do not want to bother having you apply for one to get the discount. Safeway's CEO, however, felt differently, ruling that no loyalty card meant no discount.
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Anecdotally, there are tales of cashiers swiping their own cards and benefiting from the points, even taking long vacations with them, though companies are now tracking that.

Grocery purchases are not the only data being analyzed by machines. Now online job applications are also being screened in this fashion, such as the application to work at a Xerox call center.

Some of the factors by Xerox used to predict if an employee will stay on the job are obvious, like living close to the workplace. But there are also stranger indicators. According to an article in
The Economist
, “people who fill out online job applications using browsers that did not come with the computer (such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer on a Windows PC) but had to be deliberately installed (like Firefox or Google's Chrome) perform better and change jobs less often.” There are even some findings that
The Economist
calls counter-intuitive. One example: “firms routinely cull job candidates with a criminal record. Yet the data suggest that for certain jobs there is no correlation with work performance. Indeed, for customer-support calls, people with a criminal background actually perform a bit better.”
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Consumers can turn technology against merchants. You will often see people in stores cross-checking prices with online retailers and snapping photos for comparison purposes. As object recognition and visual search engines improve even more, you will soon be able to snap a photo of a passing car, or somebody's dress, and find it, at the best price, online.

Still, the technology deck does seem to be stacked in the favor of corporations over consumers. A Canadian IBM employee, Nathalie Blanchard, had her disability payments revoked when her employer's insurance company saw her online photos and decided she was having too much fun for a person on paid leave for major depression.
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Manulife Financial stated that it would never cut off a claimant solely because of information posted on social media, but admitted it is a source that they do consider. When Blanchard posted photos of herself frolicking on the beach, she certainly wasn't expecting them to be seen by her insurer. There is some debate about how private or public her Facebook profile was supposed to be, but it is probably not a good idea to “friend” your insurance company.