Posted on 06/13/2013 7:35:27 AM PDT by James C. Bennett
Some months back, a young entrepreneur of Indian origin co-founded a company that, to oversimplify its expertise, reads your mind. Moninder Jheeta's Silicon Valley-based Expect Labs has introduced an app that can listen to an eight-person conversation, a virtual babble, glean sense from it, and suggest information that speakers may want to see or pursue — even as they are conversing.
Jheeta, who is the chief technology officer of Expect, calls it "anticipatory computing". In time, the app can reside in devices ranging from your cell phone to your refrigerator to your car, instantly and constantly crunching data it gathers from around it, including the spoken word or conversations, to provide a stream of contextual information.
Already, many US stores and corporations are using such breakthrough technologies to anticipate or capitalise on consumer behaviour. Several large US retailers use a service called Euclid that lets them track individuals' in-store movements through their smartphones' in-store connections, the same way website analytics track your online footsteps when you browse the internet.
From airport lounges to theme parks to movie theaters, tracking technologies, embedded and overheaded, are everywhere — in your face and behind your back. Across the US and other digital-savvy parts of the world, they are gathering and generating vast amounts of data.
Data, tons of it, is coming from computers, microphones, radio-frequency identification readers, remote sensing equipment, and other modes. Data also comes from scientific research — from astronomy and atmospheric sciences to genomics and particle physics.
There is an innocuous sounding term for all this. Big Data. And it is getting bigger every day. The world's per capita capacity to store such data has roughly doubled every three years since the 1980s. It is estimated that internet traffic will move up from the current Age of Exabyte (10 raised to 18) bytes to the Zettabyte Age (10 followed by 21 zeroes) in 2015, when 100 exabytes of data (equivalent to 30 billion DVDs) will be generated every month. That's a billion DVDs a day. And these are early days yet in the saga of Big Data. Next up is the yottabyte. Eventually, Big Data will encompass all spheres of activity, human and beyond.
Social data relating to humans, including medical records, commerce, security surveillance etc, the kind that has us so agitated today because of its potential misuse, will form only a small part of Big Data, much of it generated by private companies aiming to monetise it. However, it appears the biggest purveyor of this data is government, and none more than the US government, simply by virtue of its role in engendering the internet and many related technologies.
As the principal host to the world's internet architecture and infrastructure, the US is also in a unique position to monitor all data passing through it, despite expanding the data pie. News that Uncle Sam is playing Big Brother, and has indeed established a lock over digital data passing through the American gateway, has sent tremors across the free world, including in the US itself, where there is long and healthy distrust of big government.
Lost in the rising crescendo of suspicion and disquiet is the fact that governments, including the Obama administration, were just starting to get the hang of big data analytics, especially from government generated data, for problem solving. From spotting outbreaks of disease and infections to better delivery of services, from code enforcement to combating crime, Big Data is enabling things that could not be grasped using smaller packets of information.
The growing access of government data to entrepreneurs and innovators, a commitment Washington renewed this year under an open data policy, has already shown spectacular results. Two familiar examples cited by Big Data gurus: public release of weather data from government satellites and ground stations generated an entire economic sector that today includes the Weather Channel, commercial agricultural advisory services, and new insurance options.
Similarly, the US government's decision to make the GPS, once reserved for military use, available for civilian and commercial access, gave rise to GPS-powered innovations ranging from aircraft navigation systems to precision farming to location-based apps, contributing tens of billions of dollars in annual value to the American economy.
So what does the US government do amid such promise? Shoot itself in the foot with an ominous overreach that, even accounting for the hyperbole of privacy advocates, is way over the top. Looking for terrorist activity in big data is clearly a needle-haystack situation. The intrusive US enterprise — even if legal under domestic law — potentially has a more sinister end-use.
How to extract the benefits from Big Data while not succumbing to overwrought paranoia will be a challenge in the days and weeks ahead, particularly at a time when privacy is not really prized by GenX. After all, it wasn't too long ago that cellphone numbers were jealously guarded.
Now, people lay out their life on Facebook without fear. But to what purpose Big Brother will use all the information he is vacuuming into his vast data farms is something that ought to engage the rest of the world, particularly when the principle actor is a government that is not particularly known for wise decision-making in matters of war and peace, and which has a well-chronicled record of marching to folly. So let the Americans know: No data grab. Not on our watch.
Just came across this, finding it relevant given current events.
Defected former head of Romanian intelligence in his book Red Horizons describes Comrade Supreme Commander Nicolae Ceausescu’s comments, after receiving a briefing and demonstration of surveillance capabilities by the head of technical operations of its security apparatus, speaking of his five year plan as follows:
“For the past decade, each year has marked something new in our Communist history. Let us make 1984 [ironically] another cornerstone. Let us again be unique in the Warsaw pact. Let us be the first in the entire world, comrades. In a very short time we will be the only country on earth able to know what every single one of its citizens is thinking. Five years is all that separates us from a new, much more scientific form of government.
Why is American imperialism so unpopular? Because it does not know what its people think, because it is not scientific. What you are doing here comrades, is the real science of government. It is a true public opinion survey. The Communist system we are creating together is he most scientific ever, I repeat, comrades, ever to be put at the service of mankind.” ...
“We do not have a police state, and we will never have a police state [!]. We are a proletarian dictatorship preserving our ideological purity. Communism is the only real democracy, and history will attest to that for generations to come.”
My comments in brackets. This was to be done via deployment of tens of millions of microphones in standardized telephones and television sets among other other articles, capable of simultaneous monitoring. Every family periodically, with continuous coverage of suspect ones.
Governments love The Cloud. It’s the best thing that’s happened for them since the Internet went civilian.
About 7 years ago, we were talking about what it would take to take over the whole world. I said then that it would take information, and that it would take until after 2012 to have the IT capacity to do that.
And here we are.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.