En su último Crypto-Gram, Schneier nos advierte, dada la proliferación actual de sistemas para registrar pulsaciones en los teclados y el tamaño tan diminuto de las cámara, de un futuro en que será tan fácil seguirnos la pista que nuestra intimidad, al menos en la calle, habrá desaparecido de todo:
This trend will continue in the years ahead, because technology will continue to improve. Cameras will become even smaller and more inconspicuous. Imaging technology will be able to pick up even smaller details, and will be increasingly able to «see» through walls and other barriers. And computers will be able to process this information better. Today, cameras are just mindlessly watching and recording, but eventually sensors will be able to identify people. Photo IDs are just temporary; eventually no one will have to ask you for an ID because they’ll already know who you are. Walk into a store, and you’ll be identified. Sit down at a computer, and you’ll be identified. I don’t know if the technology will be face recognition, DNA sniffing, or something else entirely. I don’t know if this future is ten or twenty years out — but eventually it will work often enough and be cheap enough for mass-market use. (Remember, in marketing, even a technology with a high error rate can be good enough.)
The upshot of this is that you should consider the possibility, albeit remote, that you are being observed whenever you’re out in public. Assume that all public Internet terminals are being eavesdropped on; either don’t use them or don’t care. Assume that cameras are watching and recording you as you walk down the street. (In some cities, they probably are.) Assume that surveillance technologies that were science fiction ten years ago are now mass-market.
This loss of privacy is an important change to society. It means that we will leave an even wider audit trail through our lives than we do now. And it’s not only a matter of making sure this audit trail is accessed only by «legitimate» parties: an employer, the government, etc. Once data is collected, it can be compiled, cross-indexed, and sold; it can be used for all sorts of purposes. (In the U.S., data about you is not owned by you. It is owned by the person or company that collected it.) It can be accessed both legitimately and illegitimately. And it can persist for your entire life. David Brin got a lot of things wrong in his book The Transparent Society. But this part he got right.
[Estoy escuchando: «We will rock you (live)» de Robbie Williams en el disco Live summer 2003]
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