Technocreep (9 page)

I once found myself at the very center of a photo mystery that was bedeviling tech journalists. “Who is this geek supermodel?” they were asking as the same woman's face appeared in both Microsoft ads and promotional materials for archrival LinuxWorld. People were wondering why Microsoft would use a model that was also being used by other tech companies.

“Nobody knows her name,” Robert MacMillan wrote on
wired.com
. “With immaculately coiffed blond hair, striking black glasses and a perky grin, she's an idealized image of the geek girl next door.”
107
One industrial psychologist said she was beautiful but also somehow approachable, the kind of girl that a guy who has been coding in his parents' basement for three days could still fantasize about asking out.

I was able to solve the mystery because she was sitting right in front of me in a University of Calgary classroom. Her name is Marla, and, in addition to being a student, she had a job at a local stock photo images firm. “One day,” she told me, “they came around with a camera and took pictures of all of us and we signed model releases.”

Her employer was taken over by Getty Images, which continued to market Marla's photo. A raft of tech firms decided to use her image in their advertising, often choosing the cheaper “royalty free” option, which meant other firms could use it too.

“It's become kind of a ‘Where's Waldo' type of thing,” Marla told me, “with friends emailing me to tell me about places where they've seen my image.” I had a lot of fun breaking this story, and enjoyed her comment that “I love life when it throws bizarre incidents like this my way … I fully recognize that this is my 15 minutes of pathetic fame—so I'm savoring every moment!”
108

Revisiting the Marla story a decade later reveals the disturbing way in which photos can persist. The websites for LinuxWorld Expo 2003 and Microsoft's brochure from that era are long gone. But Getty Images still has her image for sale, and why wouldn't they? She was a best-seller, even though she told me she never received any royalties for her photo.

For the “royalty free” license fee of less than ten dollars, you too can use Geek Supermodel Marla, at least the way she appeared in 2003, in your next advertising campaign:

Figure 7. Marla in her original form. Getty Images, photo E013748, used under license.

I decided to see if Marla, or at least her hard-working photo, was still on the job. Luckily, we now have tools for that very purpose. One is Google Images search, which allows you to plunk in an image and traverse the Internet, looking for uses of it. This comes in handy for companies like Getty Images to track the use of their photos online.

Doing that turned up 17 hits, including a staffing agency in Lee's Summit, MO; a web developer in Saratoga, CA; and dentists in both American Fork, UT, and Santa Rosa Beach, FL. She does have lovely teeth but I wonder if the dentists have paid to use her smiling face?

Popping Marla's iconic photo into TinEye, a Toronto-based competitor to Google Images, produced other uses of her image, from as far away as Poland, Korea, and Japan, mostly related to a Kyocera Zio smartphones ad campaign in 2010. While almost all Microsoft sites have long since dropped Marla, Microsoft New Zealand is still using her smiling face to promote ancient versions of its products.
109

We could find even more Marla ads if we used the Wayback Machine, whose mission is to save as much of the Internet's content as possible for posterity. Just go to
www.archive.org
, plug in a website, and select a date—you are able to travel through time, browsing cached web pages that have been preserved for eternity.

We used to be able to keep our pictures private. They were in a camera, a trusted photo lab, an album, or a dresser drawer. But even if we are scrupulous about not posting anything online, hackers and even automated technology can spread our photos far and wide. For instance, a Trojan Horse call PixSteal can sneak into your computer and send all the photos it finds to an FTP server waiting somewhere in the world. Coupled with your IP address, and soon, effective facial recognition, the bad guys behind PixSteal are in a perfect position to blackmail you if there is even a single picture on your computer that you would not want made public.

The motivation to find out more and more about you has become a matter of Dollars and Pounds and Euros, Yen, and Renminbi. If Professor Acquisti can de-anonymize people on dating sites from their Facebook profile shots, driven solely by academic curiosity and using publicly available resources, what can somebody do with your personal information when there is real money on the line? A photograph is, after all, an extension of our sense of sight over space and time. But we have other senses too.

We have been extending our senses as far as technology will allow since Galileo and his contemporaries turned their optical instruments skyward. Telescopes and binoculars can be used for good (a sailor finding land) and evil (an unwanted voyeur). Sometimes the virtue or vice depends on your point of view. The hunter thinks his binoculars and telescopic gun sight are wonderful tools; the deer in the cross-hairs feels differently.

Everywhere we go, swarms of sensors are watching us. They are in the road, the signs, and the streetlamps. They are in your dishwasher and will soon be in your toothbrush. They are definitely in that “red light camera” that just snapped your car's picture. You know about that one because you saw a flash and are now awaiting the bad news in the mail. However, most sensors are silent, unlabeled, and often almost invisible. They are talking to each other all the time. Sometimes they let us in on the conversation, sometimes they do not.

Experts call this matrix “The Internet of Things,” and it is a hot topic whenever techies get together. When Rob van Kranenburg, a member of the European Commission's IoT expert group, raises the possibility of “non-invasive neurosensors scanning your brain for over-activity in every street,” most people get a decidedly creepy feeling. Yet we seem ready to accept RFID chips in our passports, our clothing, and even in medical devices that go inside our bodies.
110

Giving a unique Internet address to almost everything actually required changing the fundamental numbering system of the online world. Back in 1981, the designers of the Internet Protocol could not conceive of enough computers in the world to exceed the 4,294,967,296 Internet addresses they provided. But when you think about every car, toaster, streetlight, and school kid having one, we have pretty much run out.

The new system, called IPv6, theoretically accommodates a whopping 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 unique addresses, which should certainly allow all our garage doors, refrigerators, and toothbrushes to be connected and talk to each other. But should they?

Some sensors are clearly beneficial. The ones that alert you that your house is filling with smoke or carbon monoxide, for instance, are definitely your friends. The sensors that deploy the airbags in your car faster than human reaction time have saved countless lives. Yet those airbag sensors start to suggest the darker side of sensors.

If your car's airbag sensor alerts emergency services that you have had a serious crash, this may well save your life. But what if it also records the detailed state of your body at the time of the accident? What if it quietly takes a breath sample or forwards your most recent cell phone calls to the authorities?

Writing about the near future, CNN predicts sensors in automobiles will measure vital signs “such as heart rate, eye movements and brain activity to detect everything from sleepiness to a heart attack.”
111
The article also notes that “Nissan is experimenting with an array of technology that detects drunken driving. A sensor in the transmission shift knob can measure the level of alcohol in a driver's sweat, while the car's navigation system can sound an alarm if it detects erratic driving, such as weaving across lanes.”

One can easily imagine injured crash victims frantically pawing at the wires under the dashboard to abort certain revelatory transmissions. The scene gets even more unsettling if the sensors and their associated systems do their work behind the scenes, without your knowledge.

One of the creepiest features of the Internet of Things is how you may unwittingly become part of it yourself. Noting that GPS chips are now smaller than a match head, and keep getting cheaper, blogger John Brownlee predicts that “we're fast zooming into a day and age where GPS nano-chips will be sprayable in a fine mist all over your body as you pass through airports customs.”
112

It is enough to make you want to skip airports altogether and just jump in your car. That will come with its own surveillance issues, even if you obey all the laws and do not have an accident. License plate readers are proliferating, and there is even serious talk of tracking toll road users with them. While fugitive pursuits and speeding tickets would be the obvious applications of this kind of technology, there are more subtle ones. Oregon, realizing that fuel-efficient cars use less gasoline per mile, and that electric cars use none at all, is fretting about how to equitably collect road taxes. One possibility: attaching a meter to the car's diagnostic system to track miles driven. Privacy advocates say that somebody would quickly decide to give drivers discounts for avoiding congested roads, creating a
de facto
GPS tracking system for drivers.
113

We might well get to the point of coming home from a road trip to read our e-tickets, speeding fines, and road use charges. What about simply going for a walk? Authorities cannot tax our strolls yet, though they certainly might monitor them. Why would they do that? Perhaps to make sure we are getting the amount of daily exercise we promised our insurance company when we opted for the “active person” medical and life insurance policy. There are already plenty of apps that track your exercise, including some where you are fined if you do not meet your goals.

In reality, we would not want our sensors to tell us every time they take a reading or communicate with another system. Imagine if Google's self-driving car pestered you every time its sophisticated sensors scanned the road ahead. This new fleet of driverless vehicles has already logged over half a million miles virtually accident free. Once you accept that your life is in the hands of a bunch of experimental technology, riding in one is reportedly quite relaxing.

The day will come when our cars drop us off at our destinations and then scurry off to park themselves. Perhaps they will have car-to-car conversations in the parkade. They might even joke about what we humans were doing in the back seat. Most of us would be fine with one car telling another “I'm about to vacate stall #216.” But what happens when your car brags about the maximum speed it has attained today, and a nearby police car is listening in to the vehicular banter?

Eric Gauthier was driving his new Pontiac Sunfire in downtown Montreal in April 2001 when his car struck another vehicle and killed its driver. With no witnesses, and a denial by Gauthier, police and the crown prosecutor sought to use data from the car's event data recorder (EDR). It showed the car was traveling between 130 and 160 kilometers per hour, well over the speed limit.

The EDR, which Gauthier probably did not even realize he owned, records key parameters, such as speed and whether or not the brakes are applied whenever an airbag is deployed. The original intent was for engineers to analyze the statistics, but now police and prosecutors want to see information from an EDR accepted in court. The EDR data was admitted in the Gauthier case and he was convicted of dangerous driving.
114

These automotive “black boxes” have also been accepted as evidence in the U.S., U.K., and Australia. There is certainly pressure to have them routinely accepted as evidence, since they are objective and probably more accurate than human memory.

Many drivers are actually inviting Big Brother under the hood in hope of saving money on car insurance. They are installing “driving monitors” such as the “Snapshot” from the Mayfield Village, OH-based Progressive Corporation. These tell your insurance company certain things about your driving such as the distance driven, when you travel (midnight to 4 AM is bad; the roads are full of drunks), and instances of “hard braking” (which they define as a change of more than seven miles per hour in one second).

While slamming on the brakes may mark you as an aggressive driver, there can be good reasons, such as avoiding a child who runs into the street or a last-minute red light. A number of bloggers who have installed the Progressive Snapshot say it has elevated their stress level while driving. Others have pointed out that this is really “usage-based” insurance since a major factor is the distance you drive per year.

According to a speaker at the Telematics Update conference in Chicago, the public's concern about creepy government spying has led to privacy concerns about driving monitors. Joe Reifel, an AT Kearney partner, said that they are predicting an adoption rate of 22 percent over the next three years, down from a previous forecast of 30 percent.
115
Snapshot records data through the OBDII diagnostic port, standard equipment on most cars manufactured since 1996, and sends it wirelessly to the company. Because of the legal concerns, they do not use GPS tracking, which could yield much more interesting information about where you are driving (such as nightclubs, liquor stores, and racetracks).