Collateral damage of invasive tech (IT)

In the many articles that have appeared in recent years on the negative impact of computers and the internet on society, authors frequently cite George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to bolster their arguments. When Orwell and Huxley wrote their novels in the 1930s, there were no computers and there was no internet. Their prescience can only be attributed to their acute powers of observations of how humankind operates.

As the mantra of free trade resonates across the globe and the internet makes access to consumer goods and fake news all the more easier, a slow but noticeable erosion of privacy and ethics has also been occurring. These issues are barely addressed by top academic institutions such as the IITs and IISc which do not even have a single required course on computer ethics for any of their graduates.

Two recent innovations in the information technology industry are guaranteed to speed up this process of erosion. One innovation pertains to facial recognition used in conjunction with image databases such as associated with passport and drivers’ licences; the other, to unmanned aerial vehicles (‘drones’) equipped with global positioning information, cameras and controlled through AI programmes.

The former establishes who you are, and the latter, where you are. Day or night. Surveillance carried to the extreme as was foreseen by Orwell in 1984 where the ubiquitous telescreen was used for the constant surveillance of citizens.

While each piece of technology entails some loss of privacy, the most invasive applications can come when these technologies are used in conjunction. Based on a handful of scenarios at the intersection of privacy and technology, a recent survey by the New York Times found that a significant percentage of Americans were willing to sacrifice a little privacy for a little benefit.

One such scenario involved a camera-equipped smart doorbell system (such as RING, an Amazon home automation product) communicating with a smart phone with access to social media. The multi-faceted system could send video and images to the phone to see who’s at the door, send an alert when someone entered the camera’s view along with an image of the person, upload videos from the doorbell camera to a social network to spot suspicious people in the neighbourhood, analyse faces against criminal databases to alert the home owner if potential criminals are spotted and send automatic alerts to neighbours if the system infers convicted criminals are seen.

To track and suppress

Undoubtedly, face recognition algorithms facilitate law enforcement and security agencies, public or private, to track criminals and terrorists. However, these agencies, if corrupt or subject to political manipulation, can use the same algorithms to track and suppress dissent in any form and in any forum. Or foster targeted profiling based on nationality, ethnicity, religion, geography, union activity or politics as is currently done in China with the minority Muslim Uighur community.

It is well known that camera-equipped drones have been used to track down terrorists and exterminate them, ensuring no ‘boots on the ground’ were necessary. But it is also well documented that many innocent lives have been lost in the process – a situation euphemistically labelled ‘collateral damage’.

In an internet-of-things world, the phrase ‘collateral damage’ takes on added significance since any ‘smart’ device can now be used by IT companies to spy on a citizen’s everyday activities, rendering notions of privacy and security meaningless. Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook can track you in virtual space while drones can track you in physical space.

The easy availability of photo and text editing programmes has enabled the average computer user to create and widely disseminate, in real time, fake information using social media such as Facebook. It is only a matter of time before face recognition programmes become commonly available, a consequence of which would be the ability of any citizen to spy on his or her neighbours.

Likewise, when drones become commonly available to individuals and businesses for mundane purposes such as package delivery, some of these packages could turn out to be missiles with lethal consequences for targets, intended or not.

As the saying goes, if you trade a little bit of freedom to gain a little bit more security, you will end up losing both. In the IT surveillance world, trading privacy for extra security or convenience can even end up costing lives, especially if predator drones get involved. Eerily reminiscent of fake news and social media, wouldn’t you agree?

(The writer specialises in computer science and IT)