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| Security camera robots dance at a Las Vegas gentleman’s club during CES 2018 |
What if, by using a hidden tracker or a smart bracelet, you could monitor your child's location from home to school and anywhere in between? What if you could use brain-wave technology to tell exactly how much attention they pay in class? What if you could program your car to prevent certain (teen) drivers from traveling beyond a preset boundary, monitoring their speed and reporting back their location all the while? What if, at the push of a button, you could turn on a camera to see what's going on in that very car?
These are four very real pitches—for Tabs, BrainCo, Derive Systems, and Raven, respectively—at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that proudly position invasion of privacy as a main feature.
Privacy and technology have been at odds for years, of course. From ad-tracking by social media giants like Facebook to the NSA programs revealed by Edward Snowden, we've been reckoning with the not-quite-slow-but-very-steady erosion of privacy norms for years. This year's slate of gadgets, however, represents a different front in the war.
Mass surveillance is ubiquitous but abstract: A faceless organization is collecting digital breadcrumbs automatically for automated tracking or investigation at a later date. Alternatively, these new gadgets explore the invasion of interpersonal privacy: Someone you know may be watching what you are doing, right now.
It should come as no surprise that almost all of these devices target parents who want to spy on their children—a rare case where heavy-handing, it's-for-your-own-good surveillance could feasibly fly. Still, it's easy to imagine how it goes wrong. Black Mirror illustrated exactly that in its recent episode "ArkAngel," where this sort of tech proves so invasive that (spoilers) it ruins lives and becomes illegal in-universe. And frankly, that episode is a little on-the-nose.
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