6 minutes from a Total Surveillance Society

The ACLU's Surveillance Society Clock set Jeff Jonas to thinking what series of plausible events might lead up to total surveillance.

He came up with:

"11:54pm – All cell phone are GPS enabled...

11:55pm – RFID chips everywhere...

11:56pm – Biometric user authentication is added to cell phones...

11:57pm – Cell phones become RFID readers...

11:58pm – Cash is replaced by cell phone debit...

11:59pm – All persons carry cell phones at all times...

12:00am – Welcome to the Total Surveillance Society...

Now what?

Well, if this is the future, then I think here are some key considerations:

1. Under what condition and authority can an actor (i.e., a person, an organization, a government) look at what data, and when?

2. How will we know when an actor is breaking the rules?

3. Will oversight and accountability be easier in a total surveillance society?

4. How do we make sure that access to extraordinary knowledge is not limited to a few? And, how do we ensure that data about us is knowable by us?

5. For the few people that resist being plugging into the matrix – will they be less employable, less trustworthy, or suspected of hiding criminal activity?

With all this in mind, it seems ever more important that the technology community better engage the privacy community – there simply is not enough conversation going on between these two camps – and time is of the essence. [See: Responsible Innovation: Staying Engaged with the Privacy Community]

Why are more people not working on privacy-preserving technology e.g., anonymization, immutable audit, selective revelation, data masking, data expiration and destruction services, etc. – and more importantly why are not more organizations starting to take advantage of these emerging privacy-enhancing alternatives?"