IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Winter 2013 - 33

business-as-usual. Of course, that is also the case
today with many of the other whiz bang gadgets the
data captors would like us to adopt. From search
engines and "free" email to smartphone apps and
toll transponders, like TVs that watch us and store
shelves that take our photos - everything is bugged.
Soon they'll be watching the very bread we eat. Oh
wait, they already are! Voluntary uberveillance now
pervades most of our society [23].
The marketing pitch, of course, is that the quantified movement will herald the solution to the world's
problems - and our own individual personal problems.
Monitoring our weight and exercise levels, recording our every thought and sniffle, tracing our every
movement and location, all promise to make us better, safer, and stronger as we forge a brave new world
of data-driven human perfection. Our new ability to
quantify the self, to segment the self, to disembody
individual parts, and to provide all that data effortlessly is indeed a revolution. But will all that quantification really improve the experience of living - of
breathing, worshiping, raising children, interacting,
marvelling, loving - for those who are being sliced
and diced [24]? It is sadly all too true, as Ashton well
pointed out, that computers do reduce people to bits
and bytes: "you can't eat bits, burn them to stay warm
or put them in your gas tank" [2]. And you can't love
them, either.
we challenge the idea that the Internet of Things
will usher in a new era of human health and happiness
[25]. This does not mean we do not embrace positive
computing initiatives. We clearly do - as we are using
them to write this paper. The creative genius and pioneering spirit of our innovators and engineers is also
not in dispute here. But at the same time we shouldn't
be fooled. At its core this perceived utopia contains
both a danger and a deadening.
The danger is the very real threat it poses to our
safety and privacy [26]. At the end of the day there
is very little difference between tracking and surveillance. remove the watcher, and tracking and surveillance are one and the same thing. we, the information
predators and the information prey, must ask who is
made smarter and who will ultimately be empowered
by these so-called intelligent systems [27]. whether
by radio-frequency identification (rFID), nearfield communications (NFC), bar codes (e.g., Quick
response codes), global positioning systems (GPS),
or sensors of all types (including for image capture) -
someone is watching. what we carry, or even bear,
and the data we collect thereby, may be used either to
help us, or to cause us irreparable damage [28].
Secondly, it poses a threat to the very things we
hold dear and claim to be trying to use it to protect -
precisely, our human dignity and our happiness [29].
These are things that cannot be quantified - at least
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

wINTEr 2013

not yet, and we suspect they never will be! These
include the light in the eyes of our children, the ineffable beauty of the natural world, the joy of a hug from
a friend, the exhilaration of a cold, snowy morning.
Blanketing the earth and injecting each other with
sensors will do little to enhance these experiences,
and would even threaten to do harm.
we should not don rose colored glasses (or Google
glasses, for that matter) thinking all this technology
will lead us to a better, happier world. Independent of
how clever machines will soon become, it's hard to
truly believe that a world governed by automata would
be better than one with a rhythm and agenda set by
people - democratized, functioning organically from
the bottom up rather than systematically from the top
down. while technology promises to put the power
into all of our hands, it has a tendency to wind up as a
one way, top-down control street (like aerial drones,
and the NSA's prism surveillance program, to name
just two examples).
The Internet of Things may well lead to a "better" and "smarter" planet, but we challenge the notion
that we as human beings will be improved as a result
[30]. The regular you's and me's may think we're in
charge of our shopper cards and our mobile apps and
our smart fridges - but they all feed into the same
voracious machine - the global brain. The contents
of that brain may be comprised of our data, and bits
of our lives, but let's not fool ourselves, it's not ours.
It belongs to Google, and IBM, and Cisco Systems,
and the NSA, and the TSA, and the global MegaCorp that owns your local supermarket. If you don't
believe us, just try removing "your" data from their
database. we have rich myths about such things as
Greeks bearing gifts. we need a new mythology - a
new myth - about the people who sought total control
over themselves, and wound up having none.

Author Information
Katherine Albrecht is an executive with the private
search engine StartPage. She is also the founder and
director of CASPIAN.
Katina Michael is an associate professor in the
School of Information Systems and Technology at the
University of wollongong, NSw, Australia.

Acknowledgment
The title of this paper was inspired by Eric Bibb's
Troubadour Live single titled: "Connected" which
was produced in 2011 (https://myspace.com/ericbibb/
music/song/connected-81491541-89777198).

References

[1] K. Ashton, "That 'Internet of Things' Thing: In the real world,
things matter more than ideas," RFID J., June 22, 2009: http://www.
rfidjournal.com/articles/view?4986#sthash.NsraiwEl.dpuf.

https://www.myspace.com/ericbibb/ http://www http://www.rfidjournal.com/articles/view?4986#sthash.NsraiwEl.dpuf

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