In The Future Our Lives Could Be Liveblogged
Posted on November 4, 2006
An article in the Guardian cites surveillance expert and professor Nigel Gilbert as saying there will be so much digital data within five years that you will be able to find out "what an individual was doing at a specific time and place." He makes it sounds like our lives will basically be liveblogged by video cameras and other monitoring devices. The article also says that Gilbert said that in five years you will be able to query Google to find out "what was a particular individual doing at 2.30 yesterday and would get an answer."
The answer would come from a range of data, for instance video recordings or databanks which store readings from electronic chips. Such chips embedded in people's clothes could track their movements. He told a privacy conference the internet would be capable of holding huge amounts of data very cheaply and patterns of information could be extracted very quickly. "Everything can be recorded for ever," he said.Five years seems a little soon for there to be that much information available on the Internet about an individual but eventually it seems likely that the technology will be available that will allow this to happen. However, not everyone is going to accept pervasive surveillance and wear shirts with embedded chips or allow themselves to be constantly monitored.He was speaking at a conference at which a report commissioned by Richard Thomas, the privacy watchdog, was launched. Mr Thomas has said Britain is "waking up to a surveillance society that is all around us" and that such "pervasive" surveillance is likely to spread.