Upon 2020

Cory Doctorow writes at BoingBoing yesterday:

According to the [court] filings …, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools’ administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when …[a] child was disciplined for “improper behavior in his home” and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence.

This is what I meant. Times a hundred.

P.S. Gotta love that vice principal. You sort of wonder just what exactly students learn at his school.

By 2020, large-format flat-panel screens will be so cheap and ubiquitous, they will have replaced most pictures on most walls in most houses.

Many of those screens will have cameras that watch what we are doing, try to make sense of it, and react. Many of them will coordinate their actions as we move through the house. It will feel like we have “tunneling” windows to other parts of the world, some of them to people, some to places, some to data.

Much of the data will be transmitted to outside the house, raising a host of new security and privacy problems.