Wrote this about sometimbe back here and this has become a idea very close to my heart now....so some more thoughs
First, the debate on privacy and the obvious implication of you being recognised anywhere through continous autentication mechanisms or CAM as i will now refer to it for sake of being ....
So I truly believe the definitions of privacy are and will keep on changing, the world that we are moving towards, being recognised and being tracked by machines ( read non humans) should be fine. How that data is used is what we should be more concerned with. Who sees that data, and what it is used for should be in our control. Ofcouse, the question is control, even if there are mechanisms to control it, mechamisms which are fool proof and secure, do we, as humans with limited brainpower and scope have the ability of controlling all our data and who sees it, how it is used. Even if there were very simple but complex ways of categorising out data which in an ideal world would allow minute levels of control, would allow intersection and all the other set theory fundas, do we have the bandwidth to choose n allocate our data to all these criterions.
And that is why i truly believe nothing should be shared without our explicit approval, and that this should be governed by laws. And to help us there should be suggestion algorithms, which learn but always check too!
Another question is security, it would be really helpful to have one store of evrything, but then the person or people controlling that store will have unlimited power. And so i think that that store should itslef have the control of controlling itself. It should be the king of itself. Not a very refined thought but this is thought in process so...
Coming back to CAM, the original idea was that everyone and maybe someday everything should be recognisable. It should be possible, in some way to identify every human, not by name, or email ids or phone numbers (like in todays social world) but by something ehich is unique to you and is not replicable, and thus is reliable. And as of today, that is only u, or rather how ur built, ur fingerprints, ur vital stats, ur face and ultimatley ur DNA.
But to convert this into a practical implementation, you have to think of options. Facial recognition is not there yet, and is very device dependant. You need a camera to recognise you which is not very practical. For fingerprints, you really need to touch something to scan ur fingerprints nad be identified. And DNA, along with the other reasons is very invasive.
But what i suggest is a band (and someday an implant) whci hmonitors ur vital stats at the basic level. So it checks a combination of vital stats, processes them, identified you (every minute or second, every moment) and finally broadcast it.
Big big problems started showing up asi thought of this thought, you will broadcast your identity, but how do you control who identifies you? On a social network, you can configur manually that...but how in this. Well thats where the advanced level comes in. you not only broadcast ur identity but also signatures...so a the minimum u broadcast a 'deny recognition to all' signature and become completly anonymous. And then you you configure a signature of 'broad cast to friends n family' and a signature to broadcast to 'shops in a mall'. And you have complete control and ease of changing you broadcast levels. Think of it as broadcasting ur location through ur smartphone...!
At the receptors side, the device which captures ur broadcast and recognises you, well it will have to connect to that store i spoke about before. A store which in an ideal case will have rows n fianlly pages for each of the 6.5 billion people alive today...for the entire human population. But then the question is, should any device be able to access every humans information, no, ofcouse not.
And as i think about it, here comes the sister application, the ultimate social network, where you and only will be able to controll which device can control you.
As you read you see this is redundant, you are controlling what you broadcast and who can read that broadcast, well for sonething which is so crucial, there should be that level of control, dont you think?
And then there will be layers, like a layer which allows police maybe to override your settings, for hospitals even which is a far more acceptable use case. And these layer will be governed by laws, tough unbreakble rules if there is something like that.
The entire idea, i know, is fraught with risk, and just the scale n complexity of it makes difficult to be foolprrof, but i truly believe, we will, mostly in my life time live in that world, because its just improbable to imagine a new world without you being identified reliably...and also because it solves so many problems. Like anything else it will casue its own problems and will be misused, but I would still have Alfred Noble invent dynamite again! Its important to progress...
