Since I seem to be on the subject of Bluetooth again, I want to tell you about an experience I had recently that put a gnarly visceral edge on my opposition to technologies that serve as tracking beacons for us as private individuals.
I was having lunch in San Diego with Paul Trevithick, Stefan Brands and Mary Rundle. Everyone knows Paul for his work with Social Physics and the Berkman identity wiki; Stefan is a tremendously innovative privacy cryptographer; and Mary is pushing the envelope on cyber law with Berkman and Stanford.
Suddenly Mary recalled the closing plenary at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy “Panopticon Conference” in Seattle.
She referred off-handedly to “the presentation where they flashed a slide tracking your whereabouts throughout the conference using your bluetooth phone.”
Essentially I was flabbergasted. I had missed the final plenary, and had no idea this had happened.
| MAC | Name | Room | Time | Talk |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kim Cameron Mobile 00:09:2D:02:9A:68 |
Grand I (G1) | Wed 09:32 | 09:32 | ???? |
| Grand Crescent (gc) | Wed 09:35 | 09:35 | Adware and Privacy: Finding a Common Ground | |
| Grand I (G1) | Wed 09:37 | 09:37 | ???? | |
| Grand Crescent (gc) | Wed 09:41 | 09:42 | Adware and Privacy: Finding a Common Ground | |
| Grand I (G1) | Wed 09:46 | 09:47 | ???? | |
| Grand III (g3) | Wed 10:18 | 10:30 | Intelligent Video Surveillance | |
| Baker (ol) | Wed 10:33 | 10:42 | Reforming E-mail and Digital Telephonic Privacy | |
| Grand III (g3) | Wed 10:47 | 10:48 | Intelligent Video Surveillance | |
| Grand Crescent (gc) | Wed 11:25 | 11:26 | Adware and Privacy: Finding a Common Ground | |
| Grand III (g3) | Wed 11:46 | 12:22 | Intelligent Video Surveillance | |
| 5th Avenue (5a) | Wed 12:33 | 12:55 | ???? | |
| Grand III (g3) | Wed 13:08 | 14:34 | Plenary: Government CPOs: Are they worth fighting for? |
Of course, to some extent I'm a public figure when it comes to identity matters, and tracking my participation at a privacy conference is, I suspect, fair game. Or at any rate, it's good theatre, and drives home the message of the Fourth Law, which makes the point that private individuals must not be subjected – without their knowledge or against their will – to technologies that create tracking beacons.
Later Mary introduced me to Paul Holman from The Shmoo Group. He was the person who had put this presentation together, and given our mutual friends I don't doubt his motives. In fact, I look forward to meeting him in person.
He told me:
“I take it you missed our quick presentation, but essentially, we just put bluetooth scanning machines in a few of the conference rooms and had them log the devices they saw. This was a pretty unsophisticated exercise, showing only devices in discoverable mode. To get them all would be a lot more work. You could do the same kind of thing just monitoring for cell phones or wifi devices or whatever. We were trying to illustrate a crude version of what will be possible with RFIDs.”
The Bluetooth tracking was tied in to the conference session titles, and by clicking on a link you could see the information represented graphically – including my escape to a conference center window so I could take a phone call.
Anyway, I think I have had a foretaste of how people will feel when networks of billboards and posters start tracking their locations and behaviors. They won't like it one bit. They'll push back.
[tags: Bluetooth, Bluecasting, Digital Identity, Fourth Law Of Identity]
