[NetBehaviour] Our surveillance society goes online.

[marc garrett]

Our surveillance society goes online

The potential for computers to read and understand data places our 
privacy under threat...

By Christine Evans-Pughe.

The Guardian.

Being able to make your own decisions and hold your own views without 
interference; controlling information about yourself; and being in 
charge of your personal space - these basic elements of privacy are 
under threat, according to a new book, The Spy in the Coffee Machine: 
The End of Privacy As We Know It, by Kieron O'Hara and Nigel Shadbolt, 
two computer scientists at the University of Southampton.

While our offline activities are tracked by CCTV cameras, Oyster cards 
and RFID tags, the details of our online searches and purchases 
accumulate in databases that know more about us than we'd tell our 
closest friends. Many of us also broadcast our lives through blogs and 
social networking sites. "When one's self as a social entity, with 
history, with transactions, is all out there, then privacy is not the 
same old notion," says Shadbolt, who is professor of artificial 
intelligence at Southampton and one of the leading scientists shaping 
the protocols for the future internet.

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