Maybe It’s just me being a stereotypical English major, but parts of the first chapter of Ambient Findability scared me. How far is too far with technology? I’m not doing anything wrong or trying to hide from the government or anything , but I don’t like the idea that they could track my cell phone if they wanted to and the idea of a microchip implant is terrifying. What happened to privacy? Of course, this type of technology has its benefits like finding kidnapped children, catching killers and sparing people from having to actually open their mouths and ask for a drink, but my mind immediately jumps to all sorts of conspiracy theories.
What if that kind of information got into the wrong hands? I’m alright with the police finding me if I’ve been kidnapped, but I don’t want some random person off the street being able to track me down. Sure, most people over-share anyway and it would probably be easy to find where someone is at a given time, but I want to be able to make the choice. My Facebook is private and I’m only friends with people I legitimately talk to every once in a while, but even then I don’t post my address or phone number. I want to be able to make the choice for myself. How long will it be until something like the microchips is mandatory?
Will we get rid of social security numbers, birth certificates and credit cards in favor of a tiny microchip that you can take anywhere. You would never leave them at home and I’m sure there would be all kinds of measures in place to ensure that your identity couldn’t be stolen or your information tampered with. The problem is that we will never have a fool-proof system. Where there are people to create these things, there are also people that can find a way around the security measures. People tend to think of the future as “ a coming techno-utopia” ( 14) as Morville calls it. There will never be “a magical era when all our problems will fade into the sunset” (Morville 14).
Morville says we “will struggle to balance privacy, freedom, convenience and safety” (3). I think we are already struggling. People write intimate details of their lives on Facebook and blogs and then complain about their lack of privacy. We opened our lives to this and now we have to deal with it and we will continue to have to deal with it for years to come. Like Morville says, “Technology is a double-edged sword” (14).
The portion where you mention people writing intimate details about themselves on the internet and complaining about privacy doesn't seem to be a struggle with technology to me. Rather it seems a struggle with ignorance. It seems a rather simple concept in this day and age that stuff placed on the internet is accessible by virtually everyone. Did people forget about keeping personal journals and diary's in a notebook? doesn't it feel better to put the pen to the page once in a while? If you want the ability to filter what people know about you, you should keep the existing knowledge on your being in a tangible format. At this point I would hope that people understand they aren't really out to meet anyone on facebook. No one I know of uses it primarily to make connections. Just to keep in touch with those you already have and share media. So why put much of any personal info on there?
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