I was reading an article in the Intercept by Alex Emmons describing the application of Microsoft software able to identify individuals and read facial expressions.
I was struck by the following exchange between the journalist and the Microsoft employee.
I asked Stack whether the product could be used to identify protestors or dissidents at rallies or political events.
“I think that would be a question for a futurist, not a technologist,” she responded.
This begs two questions, unfortunately not followed up,
Firstly, you have done it now, so it’s a bit late to be asking a futurist. And secondly what would a Microsoft futurist advise in this case?”
We can look at what Microsoft’s own futurist department might think of the privacy concerns of this software.
Craig Mundie, until recently Microsoft’s head of research explains how the privacy debate unfolds;
In most cases, the subsequent debate has been about who should be able to collect and store personal data and how they should be able to go about it. When people hear or read about the issue, they tend to worry about who has access to information about their health, their finances, their relationships, and their political activities. But those fears and the public conversations that articulate them have not kept up with the technological reality. Today, the widespread and perpetual collection and storage of personal data have become practically inevitable
Of the OECD guidelines on data collection he writes
these well-intentioned principles have come to seem ill suited to the contemporary world…Today, there is simply so much data being collected, in so many ways, that it is practically impossible to give people a meaningful way to keep track of all the information about them that exists out there, much less to consent to its collection in the first place
The message is clear. It’s too late, we have your information.
instead Microsoft’s future expert looks to curb use of data rather than collection. The thread of the argument is that consent for use is preferable
A good place to start would be to require that all personal data be annotated at its point of origin. All electronic personal data would have to be placed within a “wrapper”
That wrapper would describe the rules governing the use of the data it held. Any programs that wanted to use the data would have to get approval to “unwrap” it first
The answer is simple. No restriction on collection is required, instead authorisation for use of data is employed.
So how does someone, who is being scanned whilst standing in a crowd, authorize the use of this data? Unfortunately Microsoft’s futurist has not thought that far ahead.