Future Crimes

The more we plug our devices and our lives into the global information grid—whether via mobile phones, social networks, or self-driving cars— the more vulnerable we become to those who know how the underlying technologies work and how to exploit them to their advantage and to the detriment of the common man.

The nature of the Internet means that we're increasingly living in a borderless world. Today anybody, with good or ill intent, can virtually travel at the speed of light halfway around the planet. For criminals, this technology has been a boon, as they hop from one country to the next virtually hacking their way across the globe in an effort to frustrate the police.

Not only are our personal computers and work on computers deeply enmeshed with the Internet, but so are all of the critical infrastructures upon which our modern society depends.

Perhaps one of the most critical systems vulnerable to attack is the electricity grid. Without electricity, all the fineries of our modern world cease functioning—no lights, ATMs, traffic control, subways, refrigerators, and gas pumping; and when the backup batteries and emergency generators inevitably die, no cell phones and no Internet.

It's clear that criminals, hackers, and terrorists use our interconnectivity against us, whether for profit, politics, or massacre. They have schooled themselves in science and technology and have proven a formidable force in exploiting the fundamentally insecure nature of our modern world.

You're not Google's customer; you're its product. That’s why you don't get a bill.

By using LinkedIn, you're granting it irrevocable and perpetual access (for free) to any information you have ever listed on the site. Once it has your data, work history, skills, and education, it can sell them now or in the future in any way it desires, including in ways not yet discovered.

That device in your purse or jeans that you think is a cell phone is in reality a beacon, constantly signaling the world and providing an incessant stream of data about you, your location, your habits and preferences, and your life's activities.

If proponents of the "nothing to hide" argument meant what they said, then they would logically not object to our filming the most intimate moments of their lives, or publishing their tax returns online, etc. After all, they have nothing to hide. The fact is that each of us has private special moments in our lives, made exceptional by limiting with whom we share such intimacies.

If data are the new oil, the modern currency of a digital world, then those in possession of the greatest amounts will have enormous power and influence.

By using Google Glass, are you granting the company the right to capture all the live-streaming moments of your daily life, so that it can sell these data to advertisers? For example, if, while you were wearing the glasses making your morning coffee, the Google Glass vision algorithm recognized the object in your field of view as a coffeepot, might you start seeing coupons for Starbucks on your eyeglass screens?