You're Leaving a Digital Trail (Kist)

This article mentions the new phenomenon of collective intelligence. The idea that every movement of a person can be tracked, recorded, and analyzed. Immediately my first thought was of George Orwell's novel 1984.

I think that recording this amount of information about anyone is unnecessary and could cause major problems in society. I would not put it past businesses (like insurance companies) to do their 'homework' on their customers before supplying them service. The article mentioned Google. I like using Google because it is effective and almost effortless. But, I use Google to find information about events, articles, music, photos, etc. NOT the private lives of people that I know. I don't think that it was fair for this article to mention Google alongside collective intelligence because I find them as two entirely different entities.

The Sense Networks studies are interesting because they gather information about social science in an entirely new way. I think that this form of observation is O.K. if the participants agree to it. I do not think that it is O.K. for this type of data to be generated from people that are unknowingly being tracked. I especially think that it is unethical to calculate this data to try and sell something to someone. Learning more about humanity is one thing, trying to make a dollar is another. Even Deborah Estrin, a computer scientist at U.C.L.A. admitted in the article that, "attempts to blur the identity of individuals have only a limited capability." It is unsettling to me that such personal information may be collected and there is no guarantee that it will remain private. I disagree with the statements made about privacy at the end of this article. The world being a global village is a good thing, as well as taking strides against pollution and disease, but there should be a code of ethics that takes place before information is misused by greedy businesses and others that may use it in a harmful way.