Ubiquitous Computing

As we all know there are several different ways that our identity is at risk when we talk about ubiquitous computing. I have grabbed a few different ways that our privacy/identity would potentially be at risk if this new technology was implemented around the nation. 

 

First of all, ubiquitous computing has many benefits but we still need to look for those dangers or downfalls that might not be so obvious. 

One downfall that we might not have noticed before is that the government could potentially track your every movement and potentially use that evidence for the legal prosecutions of crime or things like a cheating spouse, etc. As we talked about in class, is our privacy more important than being able to have these great new breakthrough technologies?

I would tend to want to be somewhere in the middle, but if I had to choose one, I think I would choose to have new technologies and lose a sense of my privacy. That is me personally, but I’m sure there are many people who would not look at it that way. 

I feel this way because I am usually apart of the early adopters and I always want to be one of the first to have and use new technologies. I want to have it and use it even if I have to sacrifice something important. Plus, when the Internet was first started up, I think we must have been going through something similar to this, maybe just not so extreme. Before we had the Internet it was difficult to track some ones interests etc, through technologies and when the Internet was introduced that all would change, so I believe we have had to give up things before and its just a part of the cycle of new technologies being introduced. 

As Weiss says in his article, “The future world of ubiquitous computing may very well shift from one of ease and convenience to one where each of us has an inescapable 

sense of being watched, at best, and no control over our personal information, at worst. He also goes on to say that, “These issues are already being argued in the contexts of corporate e-mail snooping and the use of IT software that can track user activity down to the level of individual key strokes.” 

As this new phenomena is approaching dangers will surface and people will be worried, but when this becomes an everyday kinda thing, I think we will see more of the benefits being talked about and not worry as much about the downfalls. 

After seeing some of the negative effects, I found an interesting quote from Hazel Grian who wrote an article about the Sixth Sense Computing. 

She says, [Sixth Sense Computing] “It's the opposite of virtual reality, instead of me going into a world that doesn't exist this brings the world that doesn't exist into the world that I live in. Ubiquitous computing reality means you can pull in all sort of data from the cloud as you walk through a real space rather than Second Life.”

I thought this was interesting because we talk so much about “reality” vs. “virtual reality” and I thought that was an interesting way to look at it.