Technology Review has an interesting article entitled ”Self Surveillance” describing the activities of a new start-up, Fitbit. The company has developed a small, unobtrusive sensor that tracks a person’s movement 24 hours a day.
To many people, the idea smacks of “Big Brother” and, undoubtedly, it does raise a number of privacy-related issues. However, I’d encourage people to think through where sensor technology is headed. Fitbit claims that the information it collects from people’s personal sensors will be used to monitor physical activity and thus help people control their weight, but there are boundless other applications as well.
For example, as America (and the world) continues to age, I can envision more and more elderly people wearing sensors to both monitor their health and help their loved ones know that they are safe. Similarly, if more people begin to wear sensors, future mobile communication devices—in partnership with sophisticated algorithms—will be able to more accurately determine traffic flow in everything from stores to our highways. (They will do this by aggregating the data from all of the sensors in a manner that doesn’t necessarily violate a person’s right to privacy). In turn, this wealth of information, can be used to increase productivity by helping people know when stores and freeways are crowded. It could also help retailers keep their stores fully staffed and allow traffic managers to employ better traffic congestion pricing policies.
