Know Thyself: Myware vs. Spyware
My latest InformationWeek column just went live: "Don't Let Self-Improvement Tools Be Used Against You" looks at "myware" tools that help you keep in control of your life and compares them to spyware tools used to give others control over your life:
Our computers are full of small pieces of "myware" -- software that spies on you for your own benefit, helping you to know yourself better. Your browser's History file autocompletes the URLs you type into the location bar; the search box remembers your previous searches. The recent-documents list in your word processor, your email program's capacity to remember the people you've emailed before -- all little bits of useful mental prosthesis, external systems that help you keep track of what you do, so that you can do it better.LinkBut "Know Thyself" has an ugly, sinister cousin: "Know Thy Neighbor." This is the curtain-twitching philosophy that drives us to spy on the people around us (sometimes at the behest of the government, who appear to have learned nothing from failed snitch states like East Germany). It's the folly that drives merchants, bosses and governments to watch us through a million CCTV cameras, track us through spyware that keeps track of what we install on our PCs, follow us around the Web with beacons, count our keystrokes, and log our library books.
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Cry,
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@#1: Warren, I don't think you read the same article I did... there wasn't any discussion of thought police or Orwell or 1984 or ranting about bar codes.
You also seem to have confused what RFID is vs what a magnetic stripe is. They're separate technology.
I'm sure your Oyster card is convenient. However, my plastic bus pass is also convenient, and doesn't leave a little record at the bus company office of every single bus trip I take, where, when, where I get on and off...
I have a question: Which came first, the word or the concept?
I think Cory's point is well taken; however, I also believe that companies like Amazon and Google are not so much interested in the actions of an individual as much as they are interested in the acts of a group of users. They want to find trends in order to market product better. It seems a stretch to make the case that a marketing group can create a police state. If the technology is there to be abused, it must be bolstered by dangerous legislation to have any real impact on individuals.
Unfortunately, with national security being such a knee-jerk issue right now, it seems unlikely that any politician will want to stand in the way of government-sponsored "spyware" programs that are designed to "protect" us.
I'm just thankful I'm not a genetically engineered pop star...
However, my plastic bus pass is also convenient, and doesn't leave a little record at the bus company office of every single bus trip I take, where, when, where I get on and off...
Although I imagine it would be fairly simple technically to set up a system that kept track of where "smart" bus pass holders get off, they don't seem to have installed anything similar on the DC Metro buses, which are my only personal experience with such a system. The only RFID scanner is right at the front of the bus when you get on, and you have to press your card right against it for it to register. You don't have to do anything with your card to get off the bus, so for that information to be tracked it seems like there would have be a monitoring field that covered the entire bus and constantly "tracked" every one of the IDs inside.
Also, there's nothing in the system that requires that you register your RFID-equipped card ... keeping your identity and your whereabouts to yourself is entirely possible as long as you don't mind taking on a little more financial risk, and you use cash rather than credit to fill up the card when it drains.
The Washington State Ferries system tracks where and when every ticket was used, so if they connected monthly passes to actual users in some way (say by saving someone's credit card info with the ticket ID, which I'm sure they already do), then WA has a pretty good picture of where and when certain regulars commute. It wouldn't be too difficult to install the same system in other forms of public transportation.
And for the DC Metro -- when you use the card in the subway, you need it to leave as well as to enter the system; they could in theory be already tracking users. Oh noes!
Last two paragraphs were spot-on, and I was also reminded of this website: http://theyrule.net . Some interesting things in the blog too.
Maybe turning the tables of surveillance will be necessary to change their tune.