JUNE 24, 2012, 11:00 AM
Shields for Privacy in a Smartphone World
JUNE 24, 2012, 11:00 AM
By NICK BILTON
Listen very carefully to me: Don’t look up. You are being watched.
That stranger, sitting across from
you, although it looks like he is talking on his smartphone, is actually
snapping pictures of you using a paparazzi-like app.
That’s not all. At that breakfast
meeting last week, when you made that snide joke about your boss, your
co-worker’s smartphone, innocuously sitting on the table, was recording
everything you said.
Later that evening, at that
restaurant, when you made an innocent, flirty joke to the server, someone
recorded video of the entire interaction.
There is nothing you can do to
stop any of it. Hundreds of millions of active smartphones in the world mean
hundreds of millions of recording devices ready to capture your every move or
utterance. Then, it is just as easy to catapult these photos, recordings or
videos onto the Internet for all to share.
So how can it be stopped? Either
someone invents that invisibility cloak from the Harry
Potter movies, or
companies will have to take a cue from James Bond movies and develop
counter-surveillance products that allow us to move about without worry in
public.
It could be the companies that
have created these technologies that help protect us from them. For example,
late last year Apple patented a technology that can
disable an iPhone camera,
using infrared sensors, when it is pointed at a concert stage or movie theater.
It was created to prevent music or movie piracy.
But this product could be useful
to regular people, too.
Todd Morris, founder and chief
executive of BrickHouse Security, a surveillance and
counterspy company, said some limited technologies existed today to help
protect people from being recorded. For example, women can use the SpyFinder camera detector in
dressing rooms to detect if a secret camera is hidden among a pile of clothes.
(Creepy, but it happens — check the Internet.)
Yet there are limits. A dressing
room or an office is a lot different than a large crowded space. Disabling a
phone camera in a crowd using something like the Apple technology would be a
nuisance to the innocents who are taking pictures of friends or landmarks. The Federal Communications Commission has long
frowned on devices that jam radio signals from cellphones.
“Short of wearing a stocking over
your head, or a fake mustache, there isn’t a way for someone in a crowd to
inconspicuously avoid having pictures taken of them,” Mr. Morris said. “In
these instances we will have to use technology to fight technology at the
server level by creating algorithms that say ‘Do not post this picture of me on Google.’ ”
If companies can tag people on the
Internet by recognizing their face or voice,
they should be able to un-tag them just as easily, too.
A day when everyone is Big Brother
will dawn as people start wearing Google glasses, or a slew of competing
augmented reality spectacles, that throw the Web up on a lens and also record
the world.
Tony Fadell, founder and chief
executive of Nest
Labs, which makes smart thermostats, said cloaking devices would
become available to protect people’s privacy. What he called audio cloaks could
be a hat that rains down white noise from above, garbling any possibility of
recording someone’s chatter. Cloaking images, however, is going to be much more
difficult, he said.
Other counter-recording
technologies could be hidden in a necklace that shoots out infrared light and
blurs pictures taken in your direction; or a radarlike watch that vibrates when
an audio recorder is active nearby. Much of the monitoring will come from
governments that hope to deter criminal activity by monitoring us, says David D. Cole,
a professor of law at Georgetown
University who
specializes in constitutional law and national security. Government sees
tremendous possibilities in technology, said Mr. Cole, “that allows it to
detect crime and wrongdoing more efficiently and more effectively.” In
response, companies will have an incentive to create technologies that protect
citizens from their government and deter officials from documenting our every
movement.
“If you think about speed guns on
the highway, there were detectors developed that you can put in your car to
detect patrolmen,” Mr. Cole said. Detectors, I hasten to add, that many states
just as quickly declared illegal to use. The government won’t take kindly to
cloaking and jamming devices. But people might.
Mr. Cole said: “I think one of the
great problems of our time, is how is our right to privacy — which is so
integral to our democracy — preserved in the face of technology?”
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