Jon Lebkowsky talks to Adam Greenfield about ubiquitous computing:

WorldChanging: We normally think of surveillance as a bunch of guys that are watching monitors that are linked to cameras that are placed around, but what we’re really talking about here, is a bunch of sensors that are gathering data where the patterns can be analyzed, and you don’t have to depend on having a human looking at a million different monitors, right?

Adam Greenfield: You sure don’t. It’s inferential. And to me, one of the scariest things about it is that it’s sort of imperceptible, right? These are systems that are embedded, they communicate wirelessly, they’re not perceptible to immediate, ordinary analysis. When you walk into a room, you might have no idea that they’re operating. But they’re collecting information, and inference is being made, machine inference is being applied to the fact patterns that they’re gathering. And then this becomes actionable. Once that exists, then people can make determinations about their behavior based on it. And to me that’s scary.

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