J.E. Dobson and P.F. Fisher, “Geoslavery,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 2003 "Geoslavery"
While recently I have been talking mostly about new technologies any applying my own context and analysis to them, I decided that getting some more background for the concerns I kept articulating was a good idea.
This article helped me see the issue on a more balanced plane: yes, the technology is dangerous, but there is really no way to stop it, only make it safer. They "advocate a rational response that acknowledges the benefits and inevitability of adoption along with an overwhelming need for safeguards," a position that I needed to take into account. What kept forcing me to be the pessimistic voice pointing out dangers and flaws was that "commercial vendors of human tracking systems, naturally, tout benefits and diminish, dismiss, or deny any potential for abuse. " Each time the marketers claimed that their product was amazing and sure to save the world in 5 different ways, I rebelled. But really, Location-based service (LBS) technology "is the quintessential double-edged sword" and it is important to focus on the positives as well as the negatives. The current "challenge is to develop safeguards that simultaneously permit legitimate uses while preventing mis-uses." However, despite these wise words of compromise, the article gave details on why we really should be worried about LBS.
The new technologies give individuals the ability to become masters, fully dominating their subjects down to every movement. For forced laborers, child slaves, and sex slaves, their servitude is now complete and permanent. The technology offers both new prospects for surveillance with every movement tracked and thus cuts off all opportunities for escape. “Geoslavery is a global human rights issue” and it is important to treat it as such, not let it be ignored by marketers obsessed with profit. The article details how the foreseeable future is worse than 1984 because surveillance no longer relies on human observers and is available to individuals as well as governments. Instead of one huge master, this technology supports many small masters, now able to dominate their subject by “plotting the person’s every movement in real time.” This is the problem, because “surveillance can confer control” and surveillance is becoming more and more prevalent, we will likely see the rise in these technologies being misused by abusive parents, spouses, or bosses.
A worry I never thought of before was that "the War on Terror might convince individuals to sacrifice their personal freedom for the sake of public safety and security." An interesting idea, and I can certainly see it working: RFID tags for airport employees, better identification for travelers (also RFID), GPS on cars and public transportation, special tracking for foreigners or suspicious people, the list can narrow right down to everyone, ubiquitous tracking for safety's sake. How does 1984 justify the constant tracking? Through the need for security due to the constant war against Eurasia! This new concern is especially dangerous because after the war, it is unlikely such measures would be removed, just look at past world wars.
It is important to remember that "technology per se is neither good nor evil, and it certainly cannot be held responsible for the sins of society. But technology can empower those who choose to engage in good or bad behavior." As this paper articulated, it is important to limit the negative uses of the technology while still fostering the constructive ones.
You equate knowing where someone is to “dominating” them down to every movement. It is interesting to think about the differences in how you can use this kind of information and what kind of control it gives. The equation seems most relevant in situations where physical escape is called for – situations of such complete domination we can think of them as imprisonment, or as you point out, slavery. This is an interesting extreme case, and one I hadn’t thought of, since as would be expected we tend to think of examples from our own experience and fortunately those kinds of situations are not part of my experience.
ReplyDeleteThe other issue you raise is much broader – going beyond location tracking or even computer technologies. In many ways over many times, governments get people to trade liberty for security, and the current version is “terrorism” The Nazis did it with communism as the threat, the communists with capitalism, the McCarthyites with Communism, etc. The big question there is how to combine security with liberty rather than feeling one of them needs to go in exchange for the other. The handoff from Bush to Obama has raised a number of interesting areas in that regard. Are there ways in which technologies can help get beyond zero-sum games?