... the threats posed by information technology to civil liberties. But my friend Robert G. Kennedy III came close. In
April 1989 he wrote
Technological Threats To Civil Liberties. From almost 30 years later it is an amazingly perceptive piece. Here are two samples to encourage you to read the whole thing:
An alarming synergy could occur when debit card data is accessed by
connectionist machines (neural networks) for business applications.
There are patterns to our behavior (economic and otherwise) of which we
ourselves might be unaware; these can be extracted by neural nets
without the need for formal rules, models, or a priori knowledge. A net
is very, very good at pattern inference and recognition. ...
One can see the potential for some truly subtle forms of embezzlement, irresistable invasive advertising keyed to surreptitiously acquired
psychological profiles, or consumer fraud on a grand scale, among other
things.
and:
An executive I know has told me of an office surveillance/attendance
system being installed at his company, along the same lines as home
security systems. Commercial versions have been on the market for over a
year. It uses interactive badges and scanners, sort of
transponders-in-an-ID, to track the location, time, and identity of
personnel in a building: sort of an electronic leash. (He confided that
it is silly to treat employees as bar-coded merchandise; for my part, I
was polite enough not to mention the phrase, "Big Brother".)
As you read, remember that it was written
two-and-a-half years before the
first US Web page went up (which was around 6
th Dec. 1991).
No comments:
Post a Comment