Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Yet another threat to privacy


It's reported that scientists have come up with a new way to monitor 'everything'. CNN reports:

In the 1990s, a researcher named Kris Pister dreamed up a wild future in which people would sprinkle the Earth with countless tiny sensors, no larger than grains of rice.

These "smart dust" particles, as he called them, would monitor everything, acting like electronic nerve endings for the planet. Fitted with computing power, sensing equipment, wireless radios and long battery life, the smart dust would make observations and relay mountains of real-time data about people, cities and the natural environment.

Now, a version of Pister's smart dust fantasy is starting to become reality.

"It's exciting. It's been a long time coming," said Pister, a computing professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

"I coined the phrase 14 years ago. So smart dust has taken a while, but it's finally here."

Maybe not exactly how he envisioned it. But there has been progress.

The latest news comes from the computer and printing company Hewlett-Packard, which recently announced it's working on a project it calls the "Central Nervous System for the Earth." In coming years, the company plans to deploy a trillion sensors all over the planet.

The wireless devices would check to see if ecosystems are healthy, detect earthquakes more rapidly, predict traffic patterns and monitor energy use. The idea is that accidents could be prevented and energy could be saved if people knew more about the world in real time, instead of when workers check on these issues only occasionally.

HP will take its first step toward this goal in about two years, said Pete Hartwell, a senior researcher at HP Labs in Palo Alto. The company has made plans with Royal Dutch Shell to install 1 million matchbook-size monitors to aid in oil exploration by measuring rock vibrations and movement, he said. Those sensors, which already have been developed, will cover a 6-square-mile area.

That will be the largest smart dust deployment to date, he said.

"We just think now, the technology has reached a point where it makes basic sense for us ... to get this out of the lab and into reality," Hartwell said.

. . .

The sheer number of sensors in the network is what truly makes a smart dust project different from other efforts to record data about the world, said Deborah Estrin, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles, who works in the field.

Smart dust researchers tend to talk in the millions, billions and trillions.

Some say reality has diverged so far from the smart dust concept that it's time to dump that term in favor or something less sexy. "Wireless sensor networks" or "meshes" are terms finding greater acceptance with some researchers.

Estrin said it's important to ditch the idea that smart dust sensors would be disposable.

Sensors have to be designed for specific purposes and spread out on the land intentionally -- not scattered in the wind, as smart dust was initially pitched, she said.

. . .

Wireless sensors currently monitor farms, factories, data centers and bridges to promote efficiency and understanding of how these systems work, researchers said in interviews.

In all of these cases, the sensor networks are deployed for a specific purpose.

For example, a company called Streetline has installed 12,000 sensors on parking spots and highways in San Francisco. The sensors don't know everything that's going on at those parking spots. They are equipped with magnetometers to sense whether or not a huge metal object -- hopefully a car -- is sitting on the spot.

That data will soon be available to people who can use it to figure out where to park, said Tod Dykstra, Streetline's CEO.

It also tells the cities if the meters have expired.

Other sensors are equipped to measure vibration in factories and oil refineries to spot machine problems and inefficiencies before they cause trouble. Still others might pick up data about temperature, chemistry or sound. Tiny cameras or radars also can be tacked onto the data-collecting network to detect the presence of people or vehicles.

The power of these networks is that they eventually can be connected, said David Culler, a computer science professor at UC Berkeley.

Culler says the development of these wireless sensor networks is analogous to the creation of the World Wide Web. What's being created with the smart dust idea is a "Real World Web," he said.

. . .

Even when deployed for science or the public, some people still get a Big Brother feeling -- the uncomfortable sense of being under constant, secret surveillance -- from the idea of putting trillions of monitors all over the world.

"It's a very, very, very huge potential privacy invasion because we're talking about very, very small sensors that can be undetectable, effectively," said Lee Tien, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocate.

"They are there in such numbers that you really can't do anything about them in terms of easy countermeasures."

That doesn't mean that researchers should stop working on smart dust. But they should be mindful of privacy as the work progresses, he said.

Pister said the wireless frequencies that smart dust sensors use to communicate -- which work kind of like Wi-Fi -- have security built into them. So the data is public only if the person or company that installed the sensor wants it to be, he said.

"Clearly, there are security concerns and privacy concerns," he said, "and the good news is that when the radio technology was being developed for this stuff, it was shortly after all of the big concerns about Wi-Fi security. ... We've got all the security tools we need underneath to make this information private."

Further privacy concerns may arise if another vision for smart dust comes true. Some researchers are looking into making mobile phones into sensors.

In this scenario, the billions of people roaming the Earth with cell phones become the "smart dust."


There's more at the link.

Y'know, this sounds all very well, and I can understand why scientists are excited at the prospect . . . but what will it mean for personal privacy? In the past few days I've mentioned micro air vehicles that can cling inconspicuously to surfaces, transmitting data to their home base. What happens if they're joined to a network of 'smart dust' sensors as well? Will there be anywhere on Earth that we can be alone and in private?

These new technologies may be great from a research perspective, but I'm afraid I rate personal privacy rather higher on my scale of relative values than I do universal data gathering and storage. I suspect I'm far from alone in that perspective. I wonder what (if anything) the scientists will do to accommodate our concerns?

Peter

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

bruce said...

it is scary.
another consideration, its the selective isolation from the chatter of outside interruptions that allows people to concentrate.

On a grander scale I wonder if society doesn't operate in a similar manor. Too much data= too much diversion.

Anonymous said...

As Bruce said there is a real problem of data overload. I have found from working on security nets that sometimes people would get so focused on data that they never saw the problem in total.

You could add programs to make decisions and filter but that just adds more complexity and time. More chance of failure.

Millions of sensors giving you null data uses up bandwidth. So if you want to defeat it just make them measure something, anything, and start to overload the system.

Unless it's SKYNET, then your doomed anyway.

Gerry

JC said...

Bruce and 'mous have got hold of the idea, however I prefer the phrase I coined ~1974: "Chaff-to-Wheat Ratio".

London, England (not New London, Texas) has got tp be considered as the test bed of universal panoptic surveillance has over 10,000 cameras, yet still has a rising crime rate.

Notwithstanding that many of the "crimes" are preachers on streetcorners quoting the Bible on the sin of homosexuality, the actual rate of violent crime is really amazing.

Anonymous said...

"That doesn't mean that researchers should stop working on smart dust. But they should be mindful of privacy as the work progresses, he said."

Because researchers ALWAY bear in mind the potential misuse of their ideas, and NEVER regard what they do as nothing more than advancing science, right?

I predict that we'll start seeing counterspy equipment become available to the public. At least I hope we do.

Antibubba

PeaceableGuy said...

My solution to this: I opened whatever lines of credit I figured I'd need with a small bank or credit union, then froze my report permanently with all three reporting agencies.

I'd also signed up with a company to assist in clearing up other types of crap caused by identity fraud (medical, criminal, etc.), rather than a company who claims to prevent fraud (impossible and useless). (Zander Insurance is the reseller of the service I bought, but they're good folks.)