On Sep 14, 2009, at 4:58 PM, Koen Holtman wrote:

In my day job I work a bit on pervasive networked sensors and RFID. In fact the introduction of these has been less rapid than I would have predicted 5-10 years ago. When you get down to it, making a solid business case to roll out this type of technology on a massive scale is not that easy. What we really need is an irrational sensor bubble but I am not holding my breath.

Oddly, I've never had to deal with RFID sensors, but an important point is that the vast number of exploitable sensor networks were never rolled out or designed with any use in mind except very narrow and purely benign cases. It is the ability to aggregate and integrate these myriad special-purpose sensor networks that no one would ever consider to be Big-Brother-esque that creates the most potential.

The actually existing scary pervasive network-connected sensor device is otherwise known as the internet enabled mobile phone. Data mining user-generated internet traffic is also a lot easier than collecting lots of camera/sound/sensor/rfid data and correlating it to people afterwards. The good news is that, at least for this type of scary pervasive sensor, the companies that are technically best placed to capture and mine all data generated are still somewhat regulated when it comes to privacy.

Mobile phones are a great source, though I think you overestimate the extent to which they are regulated for privacy, but you could eliminate directly monitoring mobile phones at the source without significantly reducing the amount of information available. Mobile phones are the most visible source, but far from a necessary one.

Nevertheless technology is on a path where it becomes more and more easy for institutions to gather massive amounts of data about individuals. This is a threat to the correct functioning of states and markets, because it creates new opportunities to game the system for the benefit of a few.

More accurately, the perceived threat is that it creates opportunities for people *other* than the entrenched interests.

- All data about me is my own property, not the property of the people who managed to collect it.

Defining "data about me" is damn tricky, and anything that remains is susceptible to esoteric analytics that can extract "data about me".

- If buyer and seller have hugely different access to information you cannot have a fair market.

That is not the definition of a fair market. Also, what is germane information with respect to a market is very much in the eye of the beholder. One man's crap data is another man's gold mine. _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE