Somebody's watching you!

Back in the late 18^th century, philosopher Jeremy Bentham outlined a design for a new type of prison. He dubbed his idea “Panopticon” because it was designed to allow the jailers to observe everything the prisoners were up to without their being aware that they were being observed.

Fast-forward some 250 years, and it appears that we may be on the verge of turning the entire world into a giant Panopticon. Only we're not calling it that; we're calling it a “smart system.” Smart systems rely on microchips, computerized tracking devices and network technology to allow objects – both inanimate and animate – to communicate their states to others. Smart systems are already monitoring the health of cows and the whereabouts of millions through smartphone applications like Foursquare.

At least Foursquare is voluntary; you have to choose to use it. But once you do, its default state is to share what you tell it with everyone you know, and quite likely many people you don't know via Facebook and Twitter.

A recent special report in The Economist (membership and purchase required to view) chronicled how smart systems are blurring the line between the real and digital worlds, between real life and Second Life. The convergence promises all sorts of benefits, but there are some very real costs. One of them may well be privacy. It's still dawning on many that all these tools that let you share your life with your friends also share your life with plenty of strangers, and as our monitoring systems become more sophisticated and interconnected, the possibility that these systems might be used to control people and not just keep track of them increase. In one of its lead editorials, The Economist editors suggested that one simple step that could be taken to reduce that likelihood is for sites like Facebook and Twitter to set their privacy controls so that they default to the maximum. While this diminishes these sites' ability to make money by selling your eyeballs to advertisers, it would at least put the power to control our information back where it belongs – in our hands.

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By: Sandy Smith