Thoughts from Inside the Box

A while ago I was attending a presentation session related to context-aware computing. One of the presentations was about identifying people by their walk. The floor has sensor that measure the pressure that your steps make, and then they figure out from the pressure curve who you are.

This got me thinking about all the research that is being done on automatic recognition of people. Things like this, face recognition, typing patterns, whatnot. They may not be perfect, but there's a lot of money being spent on them, and they may get good enough.

So why couldn't someone start research on thwarting these systems? For instance, for the walking pattern you could possibly switch shoes frequently and try to vary your speed and step length. Other ideas might work for other technologies. And of course you need some computer assistance to keep from having patterns in your avoidance techniques. I think it might make for interesting and useful research, though I don't know who would fund it.

But one general point to make is that in the past you had privacy because there was no way to violate it on a large scale. In the future, there will be a way, so having privacy will require some active attempt to preserve it.

Labels: subversive

# posted by JayK @ 19:30